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Stern, D.B. (2010). Partners in Thought: Working with Experience, Dissociation and Enactment. Paperback. New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 229 pp., $34.95.
Donnel Stern has long been associated with the relational and interpersonal model of analytic thinking. Like other practitioners working from a self-psychology framework, relational practitioners also attend to a patient's early history and its effect upon present-day events. However, they emphasize the relational repercussions of earlier life. In writing Partners in Thought: Working with Unformulated Experience, Dissociation and Enactment, Stern sets himself the task of further describing what he believes to be the unique qualities of unformulated experiences and the effects that these experiences have upon the lives of those carrying them.
Unformulated experiences are experiences that have not been symbolized, and thus cannot be put into words. Stern links unformulated experiences with dissociation and enactment in a carefully constructed series of chapters that considers first the definitions of dissociation and repression, then suggests that one cannot repress an experience that has not been symbolized. Dissociated experiences, on the other hand, are simply cut away from the person's experience and do not need to be symbolized. Since the ability to symbolize develops well after birth, he concludes that dissociation is the more primary defense.
Examining his way of working in analysis and the impact that a patient's use of dissociation will have on it, Stern describes analysis as a mutual exploration, an authentic conversation between analyst and patient. He differentiates his definition of analysis as mutually and fully open to the conscious and unconscious influence of the other from that of other schools of psychodynamic practice where the analyst is said to have a circumscribed aspect of the mind from which the analyst can objectively observe and reflect upon the patient's role in the interpe