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In this intellectually stimulating but at times difficult to comprehend work, Stern challenges the reader's assumptions about what it means to experience something and to know it consciously. In exploring how unconscious experience is transformed into new and useful knowledge, Stern asks psychoanalysts to question the nature of their experience and its embededness in what they believe they know in order to think creatively about themselves, their patients, and the analytic process. Yet, in grounding his theorizing in contemporary hermeneutic approach to understanding and a poststructuralist analysis of language, Stern does not answer, at least to my satisfaction, the question of what it is that psychoanalysts know and how they know it. What these approaches do successfully in Stern's able hands is clearly explicate how experience is constructed within the interactive matrix of the analytic dyad and how an inquisitive attitude toward that experience cause new organizations of meaning to emerge from that which is known. In this way does Stern transform psychoanalysis from merely uncovering what is old and known into creating something new and revelatory. It is from this vantage point that I found Stern's book a significant contribution to our field.
In the first four chapters of his book, Stern defines the nature of conscious and unconscious experience that lays the framework for his approach to psychoanalysis. Taking a constructivist position, Stern argues that experience is organized at the moment of its creation. An experience takes a particular form by the perspective taken on the elements that make