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Following Stephen Mitchell's untimely death, Donnel Stern is rightly seen as the doyen of Relational Psychoanalysis (RP). In a series of publications he has eloquently and passionately expounded its theoretical-clinical principles in an accessible yet never oversimplified way. This latest volume, mainly a compilation of papers published over the past 10 years or so, further explicates and consolidates his earlier views .
In addition to the psychoanalytic cannon, a major influence on Stern's thinking is the work of the Heideggerian philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1965/2004). This poses problems for the empiricist Anglo-Saxon mind, constitutionally resistant to the speculations and intellectual pirouetting of “continental” philosophy. A brief attempt to summarize Gadamer's ideas insofar as they are relevant to psychotherapy follows. The everyday terms which Gadamer uses in a quasi-technical way are italicized.
For Gadamer, a Kantian hermeneuticist, there is no a priori position from which to grasp the truth—understanding is all. We are thus faced with seemingly inescapable existential dilemma. The full truth—the thing in itself—is never without reach. All that we have are our “understandings,” but these are inevitably tinged with “prejudice”—the historical and sociological preconceptions of the subject. From a psychoanalytic viewpoint transference could be seen as a species of prejudice.
However prejudice can be transformed into understanding through “true conversation” with another. This leads to a gradual process of “unconcealement” of implicit or latent truths, albeit one that is intrinsically “uncompleted,” in an endlessly unfolding process. This dialogic exploration of the nature of reality ultimately leads to a “fusion of horizons” in which the participants arrive at a shared viewpoint. There are clear links here with the late Wittgensteinian view of truth as a “language game” in which there are no intrinsic truths, but, rather, sets of shared meanings that emerge