In the course of trying to educate myself about psycho-somatic medicine for the further understanding of my already discussed rip-roaring case of Psoriasis, over the past few months I’ve read and in some cases re-read the following books and\or essays and looked at the following U-tube posts:
Touching, the Human Significance of the Skin, Ashley Montagu, 1971,
The Skin Ego; Didier Anzieu, translation by Naomi Segal, Pub. 2018 by Routledge
The Rights of Infants, Margaret A. Ribble, M.D. Columbia University Press, 1943
The Experience of the Skin in Early Object Relations, Esther Bick; read at the 25th International Congress, Copenhagen, July 1967; Pub; International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 49, 484-6
Melanie Klein, A Graphic Guide; published by Icon Books Ltd., Hinshelwood, Robinson, & Zarate, London, aka - www.introducingbooks.com
Winnicott, life and work, by F. Robert Rodman, M.D. Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, Ma.
The Nature and Nurture of Love; from imprinting to attachment in Cold War America; Marga Vicedo; The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1992
A Framework for the Imaginary; Clinical Explorations in Primitive States of Being, (with a Foreword by Joyce McDougall, Ed.D.), Judith L. Mitrani, Psychoanalyst; published by Jason Aronson Inc. Northvale, New Jersey, and London
Frances Tustin, by Sheila Spensley, Routledge 1995
The Interpersonal World of the Infant; Daniel N. Stern; 2000.
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Utube
The Claustrum: A Projective Identification View of the World; Donald Meltzer Utube
New Stuff,
Re: 18feb24
Learning from Experience – Routledge Classics, London and New York, Wilfred Bion
Wilfred Bion: His Life and Works, 1897 – 1979 Gerard Bleandonu; other press, 2020
Psychoanalytic Field Theory, a Contemporary Introduction, Giuseppe Civitares; Routledge
W. R. Bion’s Theories of Mind, A Contemporary Introduction, Annie Reiner; Routledge
The Body Keeps the Score; van der Kolk; Viking Press, 2014
I'm going on the assumption that knowledge and understanding can be a part of any therapeutic context. After all, did Freud not analyze himself? I'm on the 'positive thinking' side, especially when it comes to any hope of alleviating my Psoriasis.
So after Googling the hell out of the psychosomatic theme, and then having re-read, just to warm up, the book, Touching, the Human Significance of the Skin, by Ashley Montagu, which I first read in the 1970s, I brashly waded in to an English translation of Didier Anzieu's The Skin Ego; a new translation by Naomi Segal; Routledge, London and New York.
Didier Anzieu, a Frenchman who has been successfully competing with Jacques Lacan through a theory of psychoanalysis that is “more concrete, more body centered” then are Lacan's abstract, language-centered group of theories, and gives credit where he thinks it's due to the British object relations folks, and Melanie Klein, their leader.
Anzieu makes what seems like a very good case for the human skin being what eventually evolves into the ego; with all its components and objects.
While reading the Anzieu book, I got out my copy of Melanie Klein, A Graphic Guide; published by Icon Books, Ltd., aka www.introducingbooks.com* ..., and gave it a quick re-read.
See: Object relations vs. Drive Theory
Anzieu gives plenty of credit for his theory of the skin ego to the Klein group of psychoanalysts, who were mostly all associated with Hampstead's Tavistock Center, Hampstead, London, U.K.* You might remember that I've mentioned Hampstead in previous posts as the last home of Sigmund Freud and a beehive of psychoanalytic activity since the Second World War, not to mention my own home, [it's complicated] during the winter of 1963-'64.. (I was there under no official capacity, just an innocent bystander, a young American, (High School graduate), waiting to be drafted into the Army and using that as an excuse to take a vacation; not engaged in anything psychoanalytical).
The Tavistock Clinic had been in existence since the First World War as a place for poor children to get both medical and psychological help resulting from damage caused by war. The group had moved around London numerous times before ending up at Hampstead after World War ll. During that war, A small group of American philanthropies arranged for Anna Freud to open a wartime baby nursery in Hampstead, and after the war there was some sort of merger between the Clinic and the Nursery. I am slightly familiar with the Hampstead based London psychoanalytical group because of having read, when it first came out in 1973, the very popular biography of D.W. Winnicott, Winnicott, life and work, by F. Robert Rodman, M.D., Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, Ma. And if you were to ask well "How did you get interested in Winnicott, well, then I'd just have to refer you to The Culture of Narcissism, which I also read when it first came out, because, you guessed it, I'm a self-diagnosed narcissist.
Of course after reading that very popular book by Christopher Lasch, also when it first came out, I felt compelled, [OCD], to read one book each of Kohut and Kernberg, two American object-relations leaning analysts, without of course presuming any professional standing. (That reading occurred 40 years ago.)
But getting back to Hampstead:
After the War, Tavistock became part of the National Health Service. In 1945, John Bowlby, MD and psychoanalyst, was appointed head of its Department for Children and Parents at the Clinic and began restructuring that department to make training a key component. (At the same time he resumed its pre-war relationship with the London School of Economics for the training of social workers.)
In 1946 he hired a psychoanalyst named Esther Bick to supervise the training. Bick, born in Poland in 1902, educated in Vienna, had fled the Nazis in 1938.
Concerning Bolby;
A couple of years ago, while on horseback, riding with a small group through a South Florida park, I had a conversation with a man who I decided needed to be distracted from his cell phone. [By being further distracted by me, I suppose.] Turns out he was a director at one of the Alcoholism Rehabilitation centers in our area, and so, I guess I was picking his brain, while at the same time being a name dropper, …I suppose I mentioned some book I'd read like maybe the Winnicott bio, and he, as I remember, said that his preferred treatment for his patients centered around Bolby's attachment theory. …So, later that day I looked up Bolby on Wikipedia and whetted my appetite. …Surfing Amazon Books I found the following and loaded it into my Kindle; The Nature and Nurture of Love; from imprinting to attachment in Cold War America; Marga Vicedo; The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1992. .....Vicedo is a Professor of The History of Psychology, (who knew?) at Toronto University. Her book I found a bit of a grind, quite academic and probably biased along the latest 'Gender' informed thinking about which I'm, I suppose, either ignorant or skeptical; choose one. She does however give some attention to Margaret Ribble, M.D., and her book, The Rights of Infants,* Columbia University Press, New York, 1943, and allows that Ribble’s book influenced Bick, Bolby et. al. I get the impression though, I could be wrong, forgive me; that she'd like to put a road-block up around the whole idea of motherhood, thinking that said whole idea is, well, overblown. At least that's the impression I got.
*Ribble happened to have been my mother’s analyst during the time-frame in which I was conceived, born, and experiencing infanthood.
She, [Prof. Vicedo] does do a job on Bolby though, that's for sure; [yet he seems to have survived the hit.] She points out very well how, with the help of The World Health Organization, Bolby has gotten plenty of mileage out of a relatively small amount of scientific research. What she doesn't do, though, is put Bolby and his theory in anything like the proper context. …As for what I've found out through further reading: With the help of the object relations school of thought, and some Americans like the late but brilliant Daniel Stern*, developmental psychology has put a great deal of meat on the bones of what is becoming, potentially, the new, post Freudian psychoanalytical model of the infant mind. And that's where it gets quite interesting.
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*Daniel N. Stern (August 16, 1934 – November 12, 2012) was a prominent American developmental psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, specializing in infant development, on which he had written a number of books — most notably The Interpersonal World of the Infant (1985).[1]
( Stern's 1985 and 1995 research and conceptualization created a bridge between psychoanalysis and research-based developmental models.)
To the extent that it has taken hold, (and it is not as yet universally accepted), prenatal psychology is usually tied together with developmental psychology, a more mainstream area of research. The histological territory currently under investigation is the life-span of the embryo-turned-fetus up to and including birth. The future psychological development of the individual, (called an embryo for the first eight weeks after conception and fetus until birth) is the ‘common thread’ of inquiry in these studies. Of particular interest for the prenatal psychologist is the development of the brain. Whether newborns are capable of forming memories is still being debated, as well as whether it could be possible to recover [retrieve] them from the unconscious mind, and what effect these memories might have on the developing personality. In the past, the common assumption has been that the fetus is almost completely shut off from outside stimulation, so that perception and consciousness may only begin to develop after birth. Meanwhile, clinical evidence continues to grow that perception and learning ability are well formed even before birth. In fact, since the development of ultrasound technology it has become possible to make detailed studies of the motor skills of both embryo and fetus.
Otto Rank certainly opened the door to pre-natal investigation with his Birth Trauma, and many other's have alluded to the potential for symtomology to have had it's beginnings pre-birth. (I'm familiar with Rank through having exhaustively read Henry Miller and his pal Anais Nin; and having struggled through his Art and Artist, which, though I found it difficult going, I also found enlightening.)
From Rank on, certain psychoanalysts have believed that the groundwork of the unconscious psyche starts before birth. In the last quarter of the 20th century, dozens of researchers have observed and measured prenatal sense reactions; touch, heartbeat, eye movement, motion, proprioception, hearing and the like. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts have used this research as justification for rethinking theory and practice.
Primitive States of Being
Herewith; several difficult concepts; difficult to wrap one's mind around and also to accept as science, and which seem to gravitate around how you codify pre-verbal information. (I must fall back again on my secure status as a non-professional.) I'm going on the assumption that nothing in the post-modern world is etched in stone.
To begin with, I'm learning a new vocabulary: black hole, skin ego, protective shield, psychic envelope, narrative envelope, ..&...........etc.
From: NIH History of the psychosomatic approach in France
Although somatization is accepted in all current theories, the process “differs from one theory to the other: alexithymia, operational thinking, dysfunction, incapacity to attain the symbolic level, etc.” According to Sami-Ali, all of this remains within the context of “a body-soul dualism which constitutes a major epistemological obstacle, just as [does] its opposite, monism. Relational psychosomatics strives to transcend dualism as well as monism (…) It means finally that the organic and the functional belong to a sole theoretical model, (…) in which the relational appears as the unifying principle par excellence.” Sami Ali fundamentally distinguishes himself from historical approaches in French psychosomatics, nearly all in the sphere of influence of Freudian theory and emphasizing the notion of deficiency. His approach could call to mind those of Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher Ludwig Binswanger, (1881-1966), German philosopher Karl Jaspers, (1883-1969) and his notion of limit situations (Leydenbach, 2013), and French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) with the notion of narrative identity (Leydenbach, 2013). Sami-Ali’s oeuvre is indissociable from his Egyptian roots. He has always lived at the frontier of two cultures. Trained in philosophy, while integrating Western thought, he also saw psychoanalytic theory through the lens of a different social environment and a different language. He was the first to translate Freud to Arabic and, more importantly, he translated different mystic Arab poets to French with introductory comments on their works. In these comments, he emphasizes the fundamental unity of poetry and thought, thus stressing the fundamental unity of poetry and thought, thus stressing the fundamental unity of the human being and starkly contrasting Western dualism. “Although trained in philosophy, I do not believe that rational thought can give an answer to the great questions of Mankind. In my opinion art is the only way to confront the enigma of (…) : art does not ask questions, in art, there is no need. Art is; as light is.” (Tarantini, 2004, p95) Faced with the limitless complexity of human reality, Sami-Ali sees but one way to approach it as a therapist: to be in resonance, the very core of Relational Theory. According to Sami-Ali, Wittgenstein conveys this best: “Things are immediately there before our eyes, no veil covers them.” In the same vein, it could be similarly stated that relation is, like art and light, and thus may represent the major gateway to the imbroglio of ultimate complexity...with ultimate simplicity
Conclusion: .....In France, psychosomatic conceptualization has been fundamentally shaped by psychoanalysis much more than by animal experimentation. Thus, psychosomatic patient care deals fundamentally with the patient’s words and existential condition rather than focusing on physical symptoms. As a result, the word “psychosomatic” came to be understood in daily language in a reduced way, qualifying a kind of linear action from the psychic to the organic. Furthermore, in spite of the monistic aspirations of a large number of French “psychosomaticians”, this layman’s usage of the “psychosomatic” notion continues to underline the psychic/soma division, suggesting the influence of the former on the latter. Opposing this evolution, however, French medicine has maintained its interest in the psyche-body dynamic in another form, for instance by establishing new types of collaboration between practitioners of disciplines concerned with this dynamic, such as the Balint groups mentioned above, medical psychology, (Moor, 1977) (Keller, Senon, 2007), or
consultation-liaison psychiatry (Zumbrunnen, 1992), present in the Anglo-Saxon world. Moreover, in recent years, the French psychosomatic field has expanded to new research in sectors previously considered outside of its limits, such as the placebo effect (Keller, Giroux-Gonon, Gonon, 2013) or hypnosis and its derivatives like hypnosedation (Bioy, Keller, 2009). Such research intends to better study the coexistence of simultaneous psychic and somatic phenomena, not so much focusing on explicative logic as on a more phenomenological approach.
STERN
Wayne - His last name remains anonymous, but he wrote this amazingly detailed review on Amazon.
[ The Self is born – a phenomenological perspective ] (Amazon review) The following is a reader-review of Stern’s book, The Interpersonal World of the Infant; Daniel N. Stern; 2000.
“If we just take the position of a working hypothesis for the developing senses of the self, we find the need for higher order constructs, similar to attachment theory and psychoanalytic theory. What is different here [in the Stern book] is the organizing principle of the subjective sense of self. Subjective experiences per se, the sense of self-and-other, are the basic building blocks in this phenomenological account of the self.
A phenomenological account of the development of the sense of self that incorporates a large group of data from late 20th c. developmental psychology. ….in which new research incorporates new technology.
“Have you ever wished you could ask an infant what he is really thinking, feeling or wanting? It is in seeing what the infant is capable of doing (sucking, looking, etc.), that gives [that we get] the answer, and the value of reporting and summarizing research on the development of the infant.
Stern makes over 400 references to research findings to report consensus in the field and offers new possibilities, separate from any preconceived theoretical construct such as psychoanalytic theory. While it could be considered that Stern is only providing a report on developmental psychology, he is rather presenting an originary approach to psychology in general from an observational, phenomenological, no- theoretical framework with implications for psychotherapy.
[ my first exposure to this word, originary, courtesy Wayne, and which I assume means having to do with ‘origins’. ]
“Stern shows that from birth (or prior), infants experience becoming; the process (and result) of emerging organization:
(1) Emergent Sense of Self. Infants experience an alive (felt) self while engaging the world. They experience the result (product) of forming relations between isolated experiences (invariances, or patterns) as well as the process itself. Emergent processes:
“a.) Amodal Perception: Stern reports how infants have an innate learning ability of Amodal (multimodal) Perception, to take information from one sensory modality and translate it into another sensory modality. There is an encoding multimodality which can be recognized in any of the sensory modes, from the sensory specific to the sensory generalizable. Amodal Perception may be the sensory form of analogy similar to the later ability of cognitive symbolization, and appears to allow assessment of the internal state of others. (See pp. 154 ff.)
b.) Affects (the overarching mode of all modes): Werner (1948) proposed that amodal qualities that are directly experienced by the infant are Darwinian categorical affects (happy, sad, angry) mixed with other modes of color, sound, shape, etc.
c.) Vitality Affects (in the presence of categorical and noncategorical): related to vital processes of life such as breathing, hunger, elimination, sleeping, coming and going of feeling, thoughts, sensations.
d.) Mirror Neurons are known to contribute to primary intersubjectivity, affective resonance and imitation; if not empathy as well.
“Infants do construct relationship as well as perceive, directly due to perception, invariant qualities (e.g., face, voice) related to mother, etc. The infant experiences organization through amodal perception and constructionistic efforts as well.
“(2) Sense of a Core Self: (2-7 mos.) which includes…,
a.) Self agency (volition)
b.) Self-coherence: 1.) Unity of locus; 2.) Coherence of motion; 3.) Coherence of temporal structure; 4.) Coherence of intenwsity structure; 5.) Coherence of form.
c.) Self-continuity”
"The matching of caregiver behavioral variations and infant predelictions gives the infant the optimal opportunity to perceive those behavior invariants (adaptive oscillators) that identify self or other." (p. 73) Invariance (repeatability, p. 80) is the crucial experiential condition under which the infant becomes able to encode a predictable self, and a predictable other. Invariance yields a self, and an other. Memory itself becomes the invariant due to encoding that permits recognition (re-"cognition," nonvariance).
One of the foundations of Stern's approach to self is "There are never emotions without a perceptual context. There are never cognitions without some affect fluctuations . . . . An episode [episodic memory, island of consistency] appears to enter into memory [encoding] as an indivisable unit." (p. 95). What gets encoded episodically are not specific memories, but generalized: 1)experience, 2) intuition schema, and 3) imagining capacity--a Sense of a Core Self.
(3) Sense of a Core Self with Other (9 mos. and up)
a.) Self-regulating of the infant for attachment, security, arousal, activation, pleasure, physical gratification, self-esteem, (atunement, p. 138 ff.)
b.) Self-resonating
c.) Being with: self in presence of other, physical and psychological proximity and individuation (evoked companion. p. 111)
d.) Family triad
(4) Verbal self (1 year and up)
The use of words not only gives the child increased ability of cognition, generalization and identification, but also responsibility to the parent and society's demands. When children begin using words, adults usually become less personal, more abstract, more demanding and more alienating (p. 163). Children use words as an adjunct while adults believe in words, and the imbedded demands…
Becoming verbal leads to 1) The objective view of self; 2) Capacity for symbolic play; 3) Use of language and new ways of being with and of being divided between the verbal and nonverbal.
(5) Narrative self (3 years and up)
Our autobiographical history told to ourself and to others, constructional autobiography as told to us by family. There are cultural enactments and filters affecting our self from subgroups of society, kin-groups and our family per se.
The final part of the book is devoted to implications for psychotherapy, which are profoundly affected by research presented so far, and by Stern's own research which focused on process, the now, what he called the "microanalytic interview," assessing a client's instant-by-instant lived experience at any given time. He asserted that phenomenologically we only live in the present moment, and he applied that to his psychotherapy systematically. His work integrates no less than psychotherapy, developmental psychology, anthropology and psychoanalysis.
Postlogue: Stern's findings have been updated and corroborated this year in The Birth of Intersubjectivity: Psychodynamics, Neurobiology, and the Self (The Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology) by Ammaniti and Gallese. However these authors still cling to psychodynamic theory which misses the seminal and phenomenological work of Stern.”
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WILFRED BION
[ I'm going to make another attempt at saying something about Wilfred...will get back to 'ya.......circa 3/30/24]
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METRANI
Metrani’s theoretical construct relys heavily on Bion’s thinking concerning the ‘containing’ function of the mother or mother-figure.
Metrani: “Owing to Bion’s work, we now understand that in order for the normal processes of projective and introjective identification to proceed in a healthful manner, without mutating into pathological autistic maneuvers or hyperbolic disintegration of the self, the holding mother of infancy, (Winnicott 1941) must also exhibit containing properties. The metabolic processing of the baby’s raw sensory experience (which is intitially devoid of meaning), through the mother’s mental function leads to increasing development of the mother’s mental function leads [which leads] to increasing development of symbol formation and a decrease in mindless action and somatization in reaction to intense affective states. Normal projective identification and subsequent introjective identification with a containing object leads to a decrease in the tendency to concretize emotional experience and an increase in the development of abstract and creative thinking, replacing action symptons related to painfully unbearable emotional states with increasing tolerance of psychic pain and mental transformations.
“The overanxious mother may be impaired in her capacity for reverie. If she cannot receive her baby’s communications, she may be internalized as an obstructive object unwilling or unable to contain. If she cannot digest what she receives, but is instead felt to add her own anxieties to those already overwhelming the infant (using the infant as a container for her own unthinkable dreads), then what she hurriedly gives back to the baby will be suitable only for some hyperbolic form of discharge. Consequently, the baby will develop a precocious mind as an instrument for evacuating or encapsulating experience rather than as an instrument for thinking thoughts.
“….Federn’s work (1952) preceded Bion’s thinking when…….. tktktk
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Psychoanalysis and Art: Kleinian Perspectives
Editor : Sandra Gosso, Author(s) : Donald Meltzer
This essential edition brings together a collection of classic papers from key figures in Kleinian and post-Kleinian thought that explore the relationship between psychoanalysis and art.
Sandra Gosso begins with a comprehensive and fascinating guide to the history of this relationship which began with Freud and was developed further by Melanie Klein at a time when most analysts were moving away from links with art. Melanie Klein's pivotal paper, "Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse", follows the Introduction. The other papers featured are mainly from British analysts who expanded on Melanie Klein's ideas, inspired by the influence of the creative Bloomsbury and Imago Groups. Members of the Imago Group, founded by Adrian Stokes, include Donald Meltzer, Wilfred Bion, Roger Money-Kyrle and Marion Milner; all of whom underwent analysis with Melanie Klein. Their interests range throughout the arts and this allows them to explore the relationship between art and psychoanalysis from varied and thought-provoking angles. The book also includes four chapters by Meg Harris Williams. The papers featured here investigate such core themes as the creative impulse, aesthetics, literature and symbol formation.
This definitive volume is essential reading for students and professionals in the fields of psychoanalysis, art and cultural studies.
About the Editor
Sandra Gosso is a researcher in dynamic psychology at the University of Pisa, Italy where she also teaches Psychology of Art in the Cinema, Music and Theatre course (CMT). She has contributed to various books in the field of psychoanalysis and she is the author of Paesaggi delle mente: una psicoanalisi per l'estetica (Franco Angeli, Milan 1997).
Donald Meltzer (1923-2004) is widely known as a psychoanalyst and teacher throughout Europe and South America. He is the author of many works on psychoanalytic theory and practice, including The Psychoanalytical Process, Sexual States of Mind, Explorations in Autism, The Kleinian Development, Dream Life, Studies in Extended Metapsychology, and The Claustrum, all published by the Harris Meltzer Trust.
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By Colwyn Trevarthen
Colwyn Trevarthen is Professor Emeritus of Child Psychology and Psychobiology at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and a close colleague of Daniel Stern for over forty years. He is co-editor of Communicative Musicality: Exploring the basis of human companionship published by Oxford University Press.
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Daniel N. Stern, a New Yorker, died in November 2012 after a long illness. A distinguished child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and a world-famous developmental psychologist, he transformed ideas of human nature in infancy and he made important contributions to his last days. He gave us a theory of how we create and share imaginative stories by rhythmic movements, which he called ‘forms of vitality,’ a domain that draws satisfaction and regulation from all sensory modalities in a consciousness of movement, and which, “distinct from the domains of emotion, sensation, or cognition,” gives life to all our ventures.
Daniel Stern
Courtesy of the Stern family.
As a child Dan was, by his own account, observant of people. When he was seven years old, he saw that non-verbal expressions of a baby that were clear to him could be invisible to a talkative parent. He conceived the idea of two languages, one of which, awareness of embodied movement, may become dismissed with age. After studies at Harvard of the 1950s, he graduated from Einstein Medical College with MD in 1960. He turned to psychiatry, and then psychoanalytic training at Columbia University, hoping to gain knowledge of how the mind works. Dissatisfied with the theory of instinctive drives and their complexes, which he could not relate to everyday experience or clinical work, he was drawn to research in child psychology, then a very active field. Inspired by the discoveries of ethologists who demonstrated how signals among animals guided their social lives, he tried a different approach. He became part of a group at Columbia who adapted micro-analysis of natural communication by gesture and expression when words are inadequate or misleading, and this led to curiosity about how infants share ideas without language.
Dan wrote seven books, each a step in a journey of discovery of the human ‘self in relations’. In 1977 The First Relationship: Infant and Mother summarized work at Columbia on the fine timing of expressive movements by which a mother and baby share a game. His first scientific paper, ‘A micro-analysis of mother-infant interaction: Behaviors regulating social contact between a mother and her three-and-a-half-month-old twins’ in the Journal of American Academy of Child Psychiatry, appeared in 1971. It was followed by others on how gaze, facial expressions, and vocalizations controlled the ‘stimulus world’ of playful interaction between an entertaining baby and a loving mother. As Professor of Psychiatry at Cornell University Medical Centre and Chief of the Laboratory of Developmental Processes, Stern did not see the infant as a mindless organism dependent on maternal care for bodily pleasure or comfort, and needing to learn a separation between a Self and any Object. From an approach assuming personal powers for the baby grew a new conception of the mother’s role and her experience of being with her baby, which in time became a model for a different way of conceiving psychotherapy for adult patients.
In his famous 1985 book The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Development Psychology, translated into many languages, Stern presented the infant as a human being from the start, especially gifted for attracting communication from a mother. He portrayed the emergence of awareness of self and other as a layered model like a building, in which initial talents remain a foundation for later advances. Dan’s book excited critical responses from followers of the modern authorities on the infant mind, Freud and Piaget, but the new vision was welcomed and strongly supported by psychologists who had been collecting evidence for 20 years about young infants’ clever powers of communication, and instincts for cultural learning. In his book Dan introduced new terms: ‘affect appraisals’, ‘core relatedness’, ‘intermodal fluency’, ‘intersubjective relatedness’, ‘relational affects’, ‘selective attunement’, and so on, to capture what was expressed in the infant-mother relationship from the start. Stern’s new terms became the language of a different developmental science for the baby in their interpersonal world.
In 1990 Stern, retaining the post of Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at Cornell University Medical Centre, New York Hospital, had moved to the University of Geneva as Professor of Psychology and gained a new group of collaborators who shared a particular interest in the mother’s contribution. Her experience of pregnancy, birth, and new motherhood became a topic for in-depth research, and three books: a fanciful Diary of a Baby (1990) expressing a richer view of growing self-awareness; The Motherhood Constellation: A Unified View of Parent-infant Psychotherapy (1995); and in collaboration with his wife Nadia Bruschweiler-Stern, a developmental pediatrician and child psychiatrist, and with a professional journalist Alison Freeland, The Birth of a Mother: How the Motherhood Experience Changes You Forever (1998). This last is a guide for expectant and new mothers to give support for their extraordinary experience. Dan also joined work on the relationships of the infant to with mother and father together, and with other persons. The sociability of the young human person assumed a much wider purpose, to become a conscious actor in a collaborative community.
In 2000 Dan presented a new paper-book edition of The Interpersonal World of the Infant. He made no changes to the 15-year-old text, instead adding a 26 page Introduction, which is an important addition to his writings. He reviews advances to his thinking, and gives thoughtful response to criticisms received, mainly by psychotherapists defending the classical psychoanalytic model of neuroses and therapy for patients who are able to speak, denying relevance of the research on infancy. He says:
“One consequence of the book’s application of a narrative perspective to the non-verbal has been the discovery of a language useful to many psychotherapies that rely on the non verbal. I am thinking particularly of dance, music, body, and movement therapies, as well as existential psychotherapies. This observation came as a pleasant surprise to me since I did not originally have such therapists in mind; my thinking has been enriched by coming to know them better” (p. xv)
In the last decade of Dan’s life he felt committed to a dynamic and generative view of the conscious self-as-agent with an experience of time in movement, in the ‘present moment’ of vivid awareness, and in ‘narratives’ of personal ambitions and affective engagements. New terms in the theory include ‘dynamic emotional states’, ‘forms of feeling’, ‘forms of vitality’, ‘present moments of meeting’, ‘proto-narrative envelopes’. Two books present these ideas. The Present Moment: In Psychotherapy and Everyday Life (2004) opens the way to a more sensitive and collaborative way of exploring a patient’s distress and its manifestation in all expressive actions, and in responses to an open reception by a person trained to sense the feelings behind their dynamics. The Boston Change Process Study Group, adopting Stern’s layered model of developmental change in relationships, promoted of this in practice and produced Change in Psychotherapy: A Unifying Paradigm (2010). The same year brought Dan’s final masterpiece, Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy and Development, published by Oxford University Press. Here we have an eloquent presentation of a theory of all human creativity, which depends on the creativity and sympathy for the poetic motives of body and mind which seek to discover two worlds, the physical aesthetic one of objects with beautiful properties that may be profitably used, or horrors that must be avoided, and the animated human one that senses one’s hopes and fears for relationships and may offer sympathetic moral companionship and collaboration.
This is a psychology to build not only practices to strengthen care for those in distress, but also encouragement for education of the young, and the development of laws and social industries and institutions of government that will benefit more people and reduce injustices. Dan Stern’s thoughts are with us, and will last.
Routledge
An extraordinary depiction of one analysts efforts to receive and respond to the vivid impressions of her patients’ raw and sometimes even unmentalized experiences as they are highlighted in the transference-countertransference connection. Mitrani attempts to feel, suffer, mentally transform, and, finally, verbally construct for and with the patient possible meanings for those immediate versions of life’s earliest experiences as they are re-enacted in the therapeutic relationship. She uses insights from this therapeutic work to contribute to the metapsychology of British and American object relations as well as to the psychoanalytic theory of technique. In these eleven essays, Dr Mitrani masterfully integrates the work of Klein, Winnicott, Bion and Tustin as she leads us on an expedition through primitive emotional territories. She clears the way toward detecting and understanding the survival function of certain pathological manoeuvres deployed by patients when confronted by unthinkable anxieties. In her vivid accounts of numerous clinical cases, she provides and demonstrates the tools needed to effect a transformation of unmentalized experiences within the context of the therapeutic relationship.
Foreword , Introduction , Introduction to the Karnac Edition 2008 , Unintegration, Adhesive Identification, and the Psychic Skin: * Variations on Some Themes by Esther Bick , On the Survival Function of Autistic Maneuvers in Adult Patients 1 , Notes on an Embryonic State of Mind , On the Survival Function of Pathological Organizations 1 , To Err Is Human: One Patient’s Emergence from within a Pathological Organization , The Role of Unmentalized Experience in the Etiology and Treatment of Psychosomatic Asthma 1 , Examining a Fragment of a Fragment: Freud’s “Dora” Case Revisited , On Adhesive Pseudo-Object Relations: A Theory 1 , On Adhesive Pseudo-Object Relations: An Illustration 1 , Toward an Understanding of Unmentalized Experience 1 , Deficiency and Envy: Some Factors Impacting the Analytic Mind from Listening to Interpretation 1 , Credits
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