Donnel Stern, PhD

October  17-18, 2020

Donnel B. Stern, Ph.D is Training and Supervising Analyst at the William Alanson White Institute in New York City; Clinical Consultant and Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychology at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy; and faculty, New York Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the Founder and Editor of a book series at Routledge, "Psychoanalysis in a New Key,” which has 60 books in print and another 15 in various stages of completion.  He is the former Editor-in-Chief of Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He has written many articles and book chapters, and four books: Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis (1997); Partners in Thought: Working with Unformulated Experience, Dissociation, and Enactment (2010); Relational Freedom: Emergent Properties of the Interpersonal Field (2015); The Infinity of the Unsaid: Unformulated Experience, Language, and the Nonverbal (2018).  He is the co-editor of four books: Pioneers of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis (1995), The Handbook of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis (1995), The Interpersonal Perspective in Psychoanalysis, 1960s-1990s: Rethinking Transference and Countertransference (2017), and The Interpersonal Perspective in Psychoanalysis, 1980s-2010s: Evolving Interest in the Analyst’s Subjectivity (2017).  He serves as Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and is a member of the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Psychoanalytic Psychology, and The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. He is in private practice in New York City, where he sees adolescents and adults in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, does clinical consultation, and leads private study groups.

Seminar title : The emergent properties of the interpersonal field

Seminar description : We will discuss the origins and history of interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis, moving on to issues that have been of specific interest in my own thinking:  unformulated experience, dissociation, enactment, and field theory. We will discuss interpersonal/relational field theory and its relation to neo-Bionian field theory. We will also discuss the recent changes I have introduced to the theory of unformulated experience, presented in my most recent book, The Infinity of the Unsaid.

Selected Readings:

Stern, D.B. (2018). Otherness in psychoanalysis: On recognizing the critics of relational psychoanalysis. In: Decentering Relational Theory: A Comparative Critique. L. Aron, S. Grand, & J. Slochower, Eds.  London: Routledge, pp. 27-48.

Stern, D.B. (2018). How does history become accessible? Reconstruction as an emergent product of the interpersonal field. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, pp. 493-506.