1
The Embodiment of Meaning in Relatedness
One cannot include everything about one’s ideas every time one writes so I must refer readers to my earlier book (D.B. Stern, 1997) for a description of the theory of unformulated experience. However, there are points about those views that should be reiterated at the outset of this book, at least briefly, because they are crucial and frequently misunderstood. First, the question of relativism. I conceive unformulated experience as potential experience, and I intend by that point to suggest that the shape of the next moment’s formulated meanings is not entirely predetermined, that there is always some ambiguity to be resolved in experience, some formulation of the unformulated that remains to take place, some emergent quality in the creation of whatever is to come next. At times this position about the inevitable ambiguity of the next moment has been mistakenly interpreted to imply that the process of formulation is unconstrained, as if unformulated experience can become any meaning one pleases to give it. That is not what I believe (D.B. Stern, 1997, pp. 28-32, 203-233). I want to avoid altogether the implication of relativism and unconstrained subjectivism. The idea of unformulated experience is a hermeneutic view well described by Sass (1988): “For, though it may be impossible to discover a single meaning, this does not mean that anything goes, that listeners can legitimately ascribe any meaning to any discourse. The hermeneutic view is a sort of ‘middle way’ between objectivism and relativism” (p. 254).1
I have taken pains elsewhere in this volume to describe the formulation of meaning as a dialectical process, but I want to emphasize dialectic here, too, in the beginning, because another implication I want to avoid is that unformulated experience has no structure and that the process of formulation is therefore unidirectional or one-dimensional, i.e., “nothing but” emergent, uninfluenced by the continuity provided by reality and the more structural aspects of personality. That is not the position I take.
The meanings that can be validly created from any unformulated experience are a joint outcome of pre-existing structural meanings and the emergent influence of the present moment. The role of structure, from this perspective, is played by constraints on what unformulated experience can become. From the hermeneutic perspective, reality cannot be directly apprehended; it can be perceived only through the lenses of tradition, history, and culture. But reality is there, and it shows itself in the continuous constraint it exercises on our freedom to create experience. In Gadamer’s (2004) hermeneutic view, all experience is interpretation. It is reality that provides the limits within which we are free to create valid experience, and beyond which we recognize experience as lie or distortion.1
The degree of constraint on unformulated experience ranges from high to low, and this degree of constraint differs with context, over time, and from one kind of experience to another. In the case of tight constraints, there is little “wiggle room,” which is to say that in these cases the range of formulated meanings that can validly be made from unformulated experience is narrow. In other cases, constraints are looser, and the range of meanings that can validly be formulated is therefore correspondingly wider. Consider, for example, a painting consisting of two fields of color, one pink and the other orange, the two fields seeming to float on an off-white background. Let us say that I simply attend to the impact the painting has on me, trying to formulate my reaction, or the kind of affective experience I have while looking at it, or the place of this painting in the tradition of art from which it arises. In the cases of experiences and thoughts such as these, the interpretive quality is undeniable, and the range of formulations that can be made without violating the constraints of reality is very wide, indeed. But if I ask myself instead what are the colors of the painting’s two fields, the experiences I can formulate without violating reality are so few that the interpretive aspect, while it remains real enough, is constrained enough to seem trivial.
One routine effect of formulating meaning is to provide a constraint on what future meanings can become. The impact of the past, and the presence of continuity in the personality, are thereby assured, because the most significant constraints on what unformulated experience can become in its next incarnation, or in the next moment, are the meanings that have come before. The creation of meaning is once again dialectical: formerly created meanings influence the future to take their shape, while the unique influences of the present and the future encourage the reformulation of past meanings. I made this point in Unformulated Experience (D.B. Stern, 1997) in words to which I continue to subscribe:
The given and the made are a dialectic, neither ever excluding the other and both constituting every meaning and moment. Without the opportunity to change previously structured experience, and without that previous structure to feel and think against, new experience would be impossible. We would be trapped in an evanescent subjectivism. But, on the other hand, without our capacity for an imagination that goes beyond experiential regularities, without the animation of spontaneous expression and the continuous reworking that represents our ceaseless effort to understand, we would never be able to redeem our experience from the stasis of dead convention. It is reflection that saves the unconscious from being nothing more than a set of strictures, and makes it a precious resource instead; and it is the unconscious that offers reflection on the fecund and ever-changing materials with which to carry out its life-giving mission (p. 30).
The Location of Unformulated Experience
Where is unformulated experience? Does the question even make sense? Should we really say that it exists anywhere? Certainly we would not want to say that it is “located” in the kind of hypothetical netherworld that most of us are no longer even willing to call “the” unconscious. The era of psychic geography is dead. Unformulated experience is possibility, the various potential meanings that might expand from the present moment. Only one, or some, of these potentials are ever realized. Unformulated experience is the source of what experience can become. And so, because it does not yet exist, it cannot really be said to be located anywhere, not even in the brain.
We can say that the present moment actually exists in our minds (wherever that is), but the present is probably the only kind of experience about which we remain confident enough to ascribe to it literal existence. Take the example of memory. We once thought memory had a literal existence. When we think of experience that perseveres over time, we think immediately of memory, and so it was natural for us to think that each memory was represented in stable, physical fashion somewhere in the brain. That natural conclusion is what motivated the futile search for the engram (Lashley, 1950).
But the way we see memory has changed, and in particular, our view of the literalness of what we remember has been qualified. We accept today that we reconstruct memory each time we consult it. We constantly remake the past in the service of present purposes. Citations of this point go back at least to Bartlett (1932), and in fact, cognitive and developmental psychologists have recently come to a broad and striking consensus that remembering is a constructive process (e.g., Tulving & Craik, 2000). In an important sense, then, even the past is unformulated. We continuously reconstitute the events of our lives, even if those reconstitutions often bear a significant similarity to the ones that have come before. And of course, if the past is substantially unformulated, whatever we imagine about the future must be in even greater flux. As soon as we really consider these things, it is apparent that we live as if life were much more stable and predictable than it is. And so, while some psychoanalysts today seem enthusiastic about nailing down the origins of experience in cerebral structure and process, many of the rest of us are skeptical of theories that “source” experience too specifically or concretely, whether the location of that source is said to be the unconscious or the brain.
But there is one “place” in which it may be meaningful to give unformulated experience a home that is at least metaphorical: relatedness. Relatedness is a category of living in which I mean to include not only the relevant conduct that transpires between people, but all the relevant affective, cognitive, and conative experiential processes. In imagining these intrapersonal processes, I am thinking, for example, of interaction between states of self, or for those who prefer a different language, internal object relations.
Relatedness is the nexus from which experience emerges. It is in the crucible of each moment’s relatedness that unformulated experience is articulated into knowable, usable, experience-able living: meaning is potentiated and prohibited by what transpires between us. Since the events of relatedness are only partially under our control, we are not the only authors of the meanings that we formulate in what we usually feel is the privacy of our own minds; but at the same time, and paradoxically, because the process of authorship goes on outside awareness, we are unaware, more often than not, of the extent to which we do create the experience that emerges from relatedness.
Mind and Relatedness: Hand and Glove
Contemporary interest in the relationship between dissociation and enactment, each phenomenon significant in its own right, each the inspiration for a literature of its own,1 is part of the broad interest in psychoanalysis in process theories of treatment. I hardly know whether to call this interest explosive or longstanding, because it is both: process theories have now held the floor in psychoanalytic clinical debate for decades. Across theoretical schools whose adherents otherwise usually claim to differ from one another in significant respects, I believe there has developed an emphasis on the close examination of clinical process, a move toward the study of the events of the treatment for their own sake.
What do I mean by “for their own sake”? I mean to refer to the social aspects of therapeutic relatedness. I mean that today there are analysts of all persuasions who tend to understand the transference and the countertransference as “interlocked” with one another, as Wolstein (1959) so presciently put it, each playing a role in holding the other in place. Now, of course, I hasten to add that I do not mean to equate “social” and “sociological.” I am hardly setting aside unconscious influence. In fact, it could reasonably be claimed that I, along with most analysts who identify themselves as Interpersonal or Relational, actually privilege mutual unconscious influence between patient and analyst. At the very least, we emphasize it heavily.
Even those analysts who continue to maintain that the unconscious fantasies of the individual mind lie at the heart of life and of treatment (the majority of analysts may very well hold this view; see Bornstein, 2008) would agree that their interest in process theories of therapeutic action is today extensive. Yet it does seem to me that anyone who accepts the latent/ manifest distinction, and who imagines each mind to be housed within a single skull, has to hold a different view of analytic relatedness than I do. I know that even those analysts who take the most conservative position about transference—i.e., that it is a distortion based on the demands of the inner world—would readily accept that different transference configurations are uppermost at different times. In taking this position, one might say, these analysts are indicating their acceptance that context plays a significant role in analytic relatedness. But most of these same analysts would also take the position that each one of these transference manifestations is attributable to the activation/expression of a particular enduring, underlying unconscious fantasy and the defenses against it. The latent meaning of the transference continues to be, for this group of analysts, the truth of transference. The truth exists in the unconscious and awaits discovery. This book is based in a different view.
The traditional assumption that unconscious meaning is fully formed also has a significant influence on analysts’ understanding of their own participation in the treatment. It is acknowledged by adherents of the traditional view, of course, that analysts, like any other human beings, are themselves capable of transference; but many of these analysts also believe that they are supposed to be capable, because of their own analyses, of observing the development of their own transferences in such a way that they avoid being caught up in them. Everyone these days accepts that countertransference can be informative, but it is still common for some analysts to believe that they should be able to stand aside from these aspects of their experience and analyze them before they appear in analytic conduct.
In this orientation toward transference and countertransference, which was dominant until at least the mid-1980s in most of the field, and still exists in some quarters, the analyst’s authority is at least partly defined by knowing what is true, and the most important thing the analyst should know, or come to know, is the contents of the patient’s mind. It is possible in this frame of reference, in a fairly straightforward way that can be embraced without disrespecting anyone, to believe that the analyst knows the truth about the patient.
But now consider what happens if we think in the frame of reference provided by the concept of unformulated experience. From this vantage point, experience is not uncovered but constructed, and the construction of experience involves the selective formulation of some portion of the available possibilities. Experience ceases to be a given at any level. It is not that we “have” the experience and then interpret it. Rather, we are continuously involved, without our awareness, in crafting the very shape our experience takes. It is very seldom that we know exactly how and why we make experience as we do. Experience, instead, arrives in our minds unbidden; but its unbiddenness makes us no less responsible for its shape than we are in any psychoanalytic frame of reference. Unconscious meaning is not fully formed and waiting to be uncovered; it is instead potential meaning, meaning that might become actualized under the right circumstances—and “the right circumstances” means “the right interpersonal context.”
That was the message of Unformulated Experience (D.B.Stern, 1997). In these terms, there can be no single reality underlying any transference, no unitary truth to be uncovered. Transference and countertransference can no longer be viewed as distortions, but must be understood instead as unconsciously selected perceptions that are quite real, but that represent only one, or a few, of the possibilities that might be actualized. Transference and countertransference, in other words, are created in just the same way as any other interpersonal perceptions. What sets them off is not the means of their creation, or their sources, but their rigidity. Transference and countertransference are rigid selections from among the possibilities for relatedness. Unlike other interpersonal perceptions, they do not necessarily shift easily and freely with changes in circumstances; the person in the grip of transference turns away from the possibilities for feeling, thinking, and being that might make a new experience of the other available. The experience that would change the transference (that would be a change in the transference) is simply not constructed. For the moment, for simplicity’s sake, I will not explore the fact that transference cannot be maintained this way without the collaboration of the other. Let me just make the familiar claim that, even (or maybe especially) in the case of unconscious processes, it takes two to tango. Paraphrasing Winnicott: there is no such thing as transference.
As soon as you take this kind of constructivist view, in which meaning is not predetermined but created in dialogue, the idea of a single, objective reality becomes unsupportable. I hasten to add, however, as I always do when I make this point, that the claim that reality is multiple is not at all the same thing as taking the position that reality is relative. The multiple possibilities for meaning all have a real existence, even if it is not sensible to refer to those potential existences as objectively verifiable.
I must also make sure to answer another objection I have often heard made to my work and the work of other interpersonal and relational writers. It is claimed by some that in interpersonal and relational views individual subjectivity has been eclipsed—that is, that the individual mind has disappeared, leaving only the dyad. That simply is not the case. To recognize the role of the other in the selection of the conscious contents of one’s own mind is hardly synonymous with suggesting that one’s mind does not have its own, separate existence. Even the idea that the mind is distributed, a claim I make later in this chapter, is perfectly consistent with individual subjectivity. Let me be as clear as possible about this point: the recognition of the influence of the other, even the recognition of the influence of the other on the contents of one’s own mind, does not imply for one moment the rejection of the individual mind.
Of course, as soon as we reject a single objective reality, the analyst’s old status as the arbiter of such a reality also becomes impossible to sustain (e.g., Benjamin, 1988, 1995, 1998; Cushman, 1995; Aron, 1996; Elliott & Spezzano, 1996; Hoffman, 1996; McLaughlin, 1996; Mitchell, 1997, Chapter 7; Greenberg, 1999; Zeddies & Richardson, 1999). A training analysis can no longer be considered an inoculation against countertransference enactment, because countertransference and its enactment are not different in kind from everyday interpersonal life. We can no longer define countertransference as irrational and then contrast it with a rational non-countertransference. All experience is subjective, the analyst’s as thoroughly as the patient’s. (This point has now been made so often that I would not know how to limit citations of it.) We must now understand that we all continuously, necessarily, and without awareness apply ourselves to the task of selecting one, or several, particular views of another person from among a much larger set of possibilities. That is the way we all deal with one another, all the time. We can no longer specify psychopathology as a certain kind of mental content, or even, as some writers have redefined unconscious fantasy (e.g., Sugarman, 2008), as a mental process. All we can really specify is the degree of freedom or rigidity that characterizes a person’s approach to experience, and even that specification must be understood as a judgment, vulnerable to unconscious influence. The only clinical question about transference and countertransference that really matters becomes how thoroughly willing and able each person is, under some specified set of circumstances, to consider alternative meanings.
Before I go any further, I think I should reinforce a point I made in beginning this chapter: my perspective does not require the dismissal of the concept of character, or any of our other ways of grasping the continuity of the personality. Those ideas are far too useful to be dismissed. But our notions about continuity, or what are commonly referred to as structural aspects of personality, do have to become multiple. We can no longer do with a single character structure, for instance. That idea needs to be replaced with a more flexible conception in which different aspects of character appear under different circumstances, circumstances that we then need to specify. Even those of our ideas that refer to the mind’s continuity, in other words, must become more responsive to context.
Now, when I say that the only clinical question about transference and countertransference that really matters is how thoroughly willing and able each person is to consider alternative meanings, I mean by “willing” and “able” to refer to phenomena that transcend consciousness. This kind of will and ability should probably be called intentionality, a commitment thorough enough to extend into unconscious life. In Chapter 3, for instance, in the case of Hannah, the patient’s commitment to her treatment, and her willingness to become vulnerable to me at a frightening, risky moment that one might have expected to provoke an unconscious defensive maneuver, were powerful enough to create a collaborative dream instead—a dream that proved to be what she and I needed to end a lengthy and rathe...
