SCIENTIFIC MEETING – Interpretation: Voice of the Field

Presenter: Donnel B. Stern, Ph.D.

Saturday, May 18, 2024: 10:00 am – 12:00 pm (no break)

TPS Scientific Meeting: Open to Members, Affiliates/Guests, TIP Candidates, and ATPPP Trainees Only

** DISTANCE PARTICIPATION ONLY – Registration deadline is one week prior to the meeting. Please RSVP by email to info@torontopsychoanalysis.com. Preregistration is required.

To patients, the most memorable moments in psychoanalytic treatment are seldom the content of the analyst’s interpretations, but the patient’s feeling of being understood. Interpretations are most meaningful, I argue, because each one is evidence that the analyst, who routinely becomes someone of great significance to the patient, knows the patient more than they did the moment before. I call this process “witnessing” (Stern, 2009, 2022), and as a result of it patients not only know and feel—they also “know and feel that they know and feel.” Therapeutic action results: patients “come into possession of themselves.”

Interpretations are the outcome of shifts in the interpersonal field, which reveal new freedom to think and feel. That new freedom to think and feel allows the creation of the analyst’s interpretations, which therefore serve as a sign of the new way of being in one another’s presence now possible between analyst and patient. Field shifts are jointly created, and interpretations arise from field shifts; and so interpretations are not really created by the mind of the analyst. Rather, they are the field’s voice. The article ends with a clinical illustration of these ideas.

Learning Objectives:

At the end of this presentation participants will be able to:

1. define and apply to their clinical practices the concept of witnessing.
2. define and apply to their clinical practice the idea that clinical interpretation represents the voice of the field.
3. define and apply to their clinical practice the conception of therapeutic action as “seeing you seeing me.”
4. define and apply to their clinical practice the concept of the interpersonal field.

Recommended Readings (not required):

Stern, D.B. (2009) Partners in thought: A clinical process theory of narrative. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 78: 101-131.

Stern, D.B. (2022). On coming into possession of oneself: Witnessing and the formulation of experience. Psychoanalytic Quarterly

Donnel B. Stern, Ph.D.

Donnel B. Stern, Ph.D. is Training and Supervising Analyst at the William Alanson White Institute in New York City; Clinical Professor of Psychology and Clinical Consultant at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy; and faculty at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He is the Founder and Editor of a book series at Routledge, “Psychoanalysis in a New Key,” which has over 80 books in print. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of the journal Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He has published articles and book chapters for 40 years, and has co-edited four books and authored four others, the most recent of which is The Infinity of the Unsaid: Unformulated Experience, Language, and the Nonverbal (Routledge, 2019). A fifth authored book, On Coming Into Possession of Oneself: From Field to Mind, is in press, and another is written but not yet scheduled for publication: Contributions to the History and Definition of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis. He is in private practice in New York City.