Daniel N. Stern, M.D., A Remembrance

For the last 18 years of Dan’s life, he was a consummate intellectual force in the Boston Change Process Study Group as we grappled with how developmental research could be used to understand change processes in psychodynamic and other forms of therapy. In his pioneering work synthesizing developmental and psychoanalytic thinking, he blazed a path for us all, and his thinking profoundly affected generations of psychoanalysts and developmental psychologists. Since the early 1970s, Dan made creative and seminal contributions at the interface of psychoanalysis and developmental psychology. By the 1990s, this work was so seminal that it called for basic changes in the older theoretical framework of psychoanalysis. The Change Process Group formed around this need and gathered together a diverse group of psychoanalytic and developmental thinkers with often divergent views about how to pursue such a goal. This endeavor seemed, to some observers, to be a grandiose and impossible task at best, and at worst, possibly a breeding ground for intense intellectual conflict and frustration. It proved to be the adventure of a lifetime.

Dan was intellectually fearless, willing and able to play with ideas openly with us. It was his signature, the signature of a creative person. He was unfazed, unthreatened when his ideas were disputed or scorned, and welcomed reasoned rebuttals. You could say to him, “Dan that doesn’t make any sense for x y z reasons,” and he’d say, “OK, how about a or b instead”—with a mischievous glint in his eye. Not surprisingly, within the group there were frequent spirited intellectual disagreements. Dan would disarm those in contention and charm us away from those conflictual moments, diffusing the rancor. It meant that disagreement remained intellectual, rather than becoming personal, an important condition for the intense engagement of strong-minded thinkers. Attacks from outside critics whom he considered uninformed were countered with a steely determination