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This issue is the second of two issues to pay tribute to the work of Daniel Stern. The personal tributes of Robert Emde and Nadia Bruschweiler-Stern launched the first issue, which gave a rare view into the person, and the work of Dan Stern. The articles in Part I highlighted Stern’s early work using the micro-analytic method he developed to explore the interactions between babies and mothers. This work provided a fine-grained view of how the baby can maintain and moderate the flow of social exchange and how the mother contributes to the reciprocal communication process with each partner changing with the other.
In addition, articles by Beatrice Beebe, Dan Schechter, and Elisabeth Fivaz provided empirical examples and new clinical understandings about interpersonal relationships and clinical interventions that evolved from use of the micro-analytic method. To further his ideas, Stern posed new questions about the development of a sense of self that went beyond traditionally accepted viewpoints. Bob Michels’ article commented on these ideas.
This issue, Part II, addresses Stern’s later work and the work he did in collaboration with the Boston Change Process Study Group (BCPSG). This issue is introduced by a tribute to Stern by his colleagues in the Boston group.
Together, the work of the BCPSG presents a conceptual framework for the question of what creates change in psychoanalysis and concludes that something more than interpretation is needed to bring about change. They propose that the something more resides in the interactional intersubjective processes that give rise to what they call “implicit relational knowing” (BCPSG, 2010, p. 5) or, the implicit, procedural processes occurring between partners in a relationship. In the analytic relationship, it comprises moments between the patient and therapist when something new is created in the relationship that alters the intersubjective environment. This is a reciprocal process in which change takes place in the implicit