On Coming into Possession of Oneself: Transformations of the Interpersonal Field

This book is Donnel B. Sterns latest contribution to the kind of understanding of the psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic process offered by field theory.

Stern anchors his understanding of therapeutic action in the freedom of both patient and analyst to create a meaningful experience with minimum inhibition. The fields capacity to generate meaningand thus to make possible fully realized human livingrows from its freedom to respond spontaneously to the feelings, wants, and needs of its participants. To whatever extent this spontaneity is diminished, as it is in unconscious mutual enactment, we can be sure that some part of the field is frozen or otherwise rigidified. This position serves as the foundation of the psychoanalysis that Stern practices. The analyst aims to feel their way into compromises in the field, and then do whatever they can to grasp and dissolve them, knowing that they will have to be visited repeatedly, and dissolved again. These insights into interpersonal and relational field theory lead to descriptions of clinical interventions that are focused on the moment-to-moment emotional experience of both the patient and the analyst.

With valuable contributions to theory and emotionally immediate clinical vignettes, this book is essential for all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists wishing to understand how the analysts interventions grow from the analysts emotional involvement in the clinical process.