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In the 1960s, after completing medical school, Dan Stern conducted psychopharmacology research at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, and then completed his psychiatry residency and psychoanalytic training at Columbia University.
Early on, his writing captured the dual worlds of his training. With a unique talent for imaginative thinking and an ability to bring together empirical developmental models and psychoanalytic ideas, Stern captured the attention and interest of serious-minded practitioners in both fields. Because he believed that clinical theory needed to be based on scientific research, he saw the need to undertake the observation of infants and to form clinical hypotheses about early experiences. Frame-by-frame microanalysis of film showing moment-to-moment interaction sequences between mothers and babies became the focus of his thinking. He described a reciprocal communication process between mother and infant, with each partner changing with the other. He was a pioneer in devising a microanalytic method for studying the parent-infant relationship and, as a result, Stern changed the way analysts think about infants, think about the parent-child relationship, and how they understand the dynamic aspects of experience in both daily life and in the therapeutic encounter.
During the next five decades, Stern wrote papers that contributed to clarifying the complexity of the interpersonal and clinical experience. His fascination with the micro-details of momentary experiences continued to be at the center of his thinking. These observations brought to light new thoughts about the development of the self and the experiencing of self-with-other, which led Stern to explore in detail the subtleties of interpersonal and intersubjective processes.
As greater understanding was gained about intersubjective relatedness, Stern’s clinical thinking shifted focus from a one-person to a two-person psychology, in which the therapeutic lens was on intersubjectivity,