Partners in Thought: Working with Unformulated Experience, Dissociation, and Enactment

Donnel Stern, Ph.D.

4.0 NASW*/APA** Continuing Education Units

Even in the absence of other people, we learn about ourselves by listening to our own thoughts about ourselves through the ears of the other. We need a witness, even if that witness is imaginary, in order to know and feel our experience. We need a witness, that is, if experience is to fall into a satisfying narrative order. The origins of the witness lie in earliest infancy. We need a witness to become a self; and later in life, we need a witness to heal ourselves. Our witness is our partner in thought. Patients listen to themselves as they imagine their analysts hear them, and in this way create new narrative freedom. But only what feels like "me" can be witnessed. "Not-me" can only be enacted. The resolution of enactments is crucial in psychoanalytic treatment, not only because it expands the boundaries of the self, but also because it reinstitutes and broadens the range within which patient and analyst can witness one another’s experience. Narrative is not the outcome of the analyst's objective interpretations, but an emergent, co-constructed, unbidden outcome of clinical process. We will discuss both witnessing and working with dissociation and enactments.

Donnel B. Stern, Ph.D. is Editor, “Psychoanalysis in a New Key” Book Series (Routledge); Training and Supervising Analyst, William Alanson White Institute, and member of the Teaching Faculty; Supervisor and Faculty, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; former Editor, Contemporary Psychoanalysis; author, Partners in Thought: Working with Unformulated Experience, Dissociation, and Enactment (Routledge, 2009); and Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis (The Analytic Press, 1997); Board of Directors, International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.

www.nipinst.org

CEU's will be distributed at the end of the event, upon the completion of a brief workshop evaluation.

*This program has been approved for 4.0 hours of continuing education under the auspices of the National Association of Social Work.

** The National Institute for the Psychotherapies Training Institute (NIPTI) is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. NIPTI maintains responsibility for this program and its contents.