A Discussion of the Articles in Two Issues of Psychoanalytic Inquiry in Honor of Daniel Stern
A good while ago, Daniel Stern and I were invited to Germany by a large group of movement therapists to help them construct a postmovement treatment interview. Dan and I, along with several hundred attendees, observed a demonstration in which a withdrawn aversive person was induced to join and interact. The leaders then turned to us. Before I could say a word, Dan said "Why talk? You've done it." And I and several hundred others gasped. Subsequently we did help them to construct an interview to provide a verbal narrative that would expand and consolidate the movement story. But I was left with a puzzle: What did Dan's unexpected, so spontaneous, response mean? On reflection, I realized he was validating the therapeutic power of a nonverbal intervention. And he was opening our minds to why talk; what does talking do? How necessary is it to therapeutic change? What of the other nonverbal forms of communication and the vitality and potential for change inherent in them? These are excellent questions, and in my next several books I included a section on why talk? Nonetheless, something about Dan's forceful challenge remained bewildering. Consequently, I was delighted to read the reminiscence written by his wife, Nadia BruschweilerStern (2017) about Dan's early life experience with nonverbal communication with his depressed silent mother and during his hospitalization. Dan knew first hand, deep in his being, the power, the essential vitality, in narratives told and understood before, and later without, language. He attuned to people's movements, facial expressions, the music of their lyrics and in this way experienced vitality intersubjectively. At the same time, the man who asked "why talk?" was a great talker and writer, poetic as Bob Emde writes, and lyrical as Nadia notes. He rendered complexity into understandable words and phrases that, as several authors point out, have become common vocabulary: present moment, implicit relational knowing, moments of meeting, and forms of vitality. Bob Michels (2017) parallels Freud's fascination and Dan's fascination with dance and music and his emphasis on the vitality of nonverbal forms of communication with Freud's fascination with drama and his emphasis on the symbolic. My conjecture is that Dan, who had a first heart attack in his late 30s, would be exquisitely sensitive to the significance of living in the present moment. Coming from my original training in classical psychoanalytic theory of intrapsychic conflict, ego psychology, and the centrality of transference interpretation and reconstruction, I have always been impressed and inspired by Dan's use of infant research and therapeutic experience to turn given truths upside down (see Emde, 2017) The baby is a social being forming an intimate relationship with a caregiver from the start, and with it a sense of self (see Michels, 2017) People live in the now, carefully defined as a brief moment, a breath, but the past is in the now as found in the forms of vitality that derive from the running dialogue between mother and infant. Making meaning is on an implicit and explicit continuum, so the making of meaning in a therapeutic exchange involves a moment of meeting with past moments embedded in it. The question of how the past comes to be found in the now repeats in many of the articles. The Boston Group (Nahum, 2018, this issue) describes the sloppy fuzzy quality of remembering and notes the role of the past in enactments and dissociation. Massimo Ammaniti (2018, this issue) explores the role of repeated past experience in the development of implicit knowledge. As do others, Ammaniti broadens the discussion drawing on attachment theory and clinical experience to validate and expand Dan's emphasis on implicit relational knowing.