Interpersonal Psychoanalysis: History and Current Status

Stern, Daniel N.

doi:10.1080/00107530.2016.1274870

Cited by 10 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…, 1954Sullivan (e.g. , 1956) and the early interpersonal psychoanalysis inspired by Sullivan's work (Lionells et al 1995;Stern 2017;Stern et al 1995). For Sullivan, dissociation, not repression, was the primary defensive operation.…”

Section: Sources Of Bromberg's Interest In Trauma and Dissociationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Philip M. Bromberg (1931–2020). Trauma, dissociation, and the multiple self

Stern

2021

The International Journal of Psychoanalysis

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That intimacy and depth of relatedness were so precious to Philip Bromberg, even his central truth and purpose, is perhaps an irony, because he was a shy person, not given to demonstrativeness, certainly not an extrovert. But his privacy and reserve, however prominent they may have been to those who encountered him in person, are probably much less evident to anyone who knows the man only from his work. In what follows I attend mainly to Bromberg's ideas, which have been, and continue to be, among the most influential bodies of work written by any interpersonal/relational analyst. But the heart of the man, this sense he always had of the profound affective possibilities for human relatedness, deserves precedence in considering both his life and his work. Psychoanalytic training, early clinical and theoretical commitments The understanding of Bromberg's views calls for some background about the psychoanalytic world from which he emerged, and to which he contributed. He was born in Brooklyn in 1931 and grew up there with an imaginative mother who told him stories she made up on the spot. He tells us she was "a poet by nature" (Greif and Livingston 2013, 323). Was it perhaps she who inspired his love for both the deeply felt life and the poetry and fiction he read throughout his life and wove so expressively and effectively into his writings? After college and then a brief period studying for a doctorate in English literature, he became a psychologist, and then, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he trained as a psychoanalyst at the William Alanson White Institute (WAWI) in New York City, drawn there by the ideas of Sullivan (1940, 1953, 1954, 1956), whose thinking was central to WAWI. From the beginning, Bromberg believed that problems in living did not derive from intrapsychic conflict but from the kinds of destructive interpersonal events that he eventually came to refer to as "relational trauma". Sullivan himself seldom, if ever, used the word "trauma", but as Bromberg became more and more deeply immersed in the clinical study of trauma, he understood Sullivan's (1940, 1953, 1954, 1956) theory of how human living goes awry to be a kind of trauma theory. Sullivan himself died 20 years before Bromberg arrived at WAWI, but three of the analysts who supervised Bromberg's work at WAWI, all of whom were serious students of Sullivan's thinking, had particularly deep influences on him: Edgar Levenson, Earl Witenberg and David Schechter. Witenberg, the Director of WAWI at that time, was acknowledged as a highly talented clinician. Schechter was a brilliant developmentalist whose work spanned interpersonal and Freudian

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Section: Sources Of Bromberg's Interest In Trauma and Dissociationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Philip M. Bromberg (1931–2020). Trauma, dissociation, and the multiple self

Stern

2021

The International Journal of Psychoanalysis

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“…Schachtel and Fromm were close, like-minded colleagues; and Schachtel, like Fromm, described psychological development as a process of individuation: the emergent growth of the self from less differentiated precursor states. But whereas classical psychoanalytic writers of that era, until Mahler (Mahler, Pine, and Bergman 1975), usually understood development as the succession of libidinal stages, Fromm and Schachtel, both of them deeply influenced by existentialism (as was Buber, of course) and interpersonal psychoanalysis (Lionells et al 1995;Stern 2017;Stern and Hirsch 2017a,b;Stern et al 1995), understood development as the on going struggle to individuate the self, with an emphasis on authentic engagement with the other and the fullest appreciation of the possibilities of being.…”

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Distance And Relation: Emerging From Embeddedness In The Other

Stern

2023

J Am Psychoanal Assoc

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Inspired by an essay by Martin Buber (1950), and then by the work of Ernest Schachtel (1959) on the idea of “embeddedness” and emergence from it, this essay is an account of the role of “distance” or “separateness” in clinical psychoanalytic work. We tend to assume that the capacity to appreciate otherness is always already present. We often lose track of the necessity to “set the other at a distance” (Buber), the prerequisite for emergence from embeddedness in the other. The entire process—i.e., setting the other at a distance and then emerging from embeddedness in the other—must take place over and over again in any treatment, and in both directions: patients must disembed from analysts, but it is just as necessary for analysts to disembed from patients. It is the emergence from embeddedness that allows the analyst’s appreciation of the patient’s otherness. Embeddedness in the other is discussed as mutual enactment. This use of these phenomena in treatment is articulated in the theory of witnessing presented elsewhere in recent years (Stern 2009, 2012, 2022b, in press). A detailed clinical illustration is presented.

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Who is Queer Around Here? Overcoming Rigid Thinking and Relating in Patient and Analyst

Belkin¹

2018

Contemporary Psychoanalysis

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Interpersonal Psychoanalysis: History and Current Status

Cited by 10 publications

References 38 publications

Philip M. Bromberg (1931–2020). Trauma, dissociation, and the multiple self

Philip M. Bromberg (1931–2020). Trauma, dissociation, and the multiple self

Distance And Relation: Emerging From Embeddedness In The Other

Who is Queer Around Here? Overcoming Rigid Thinking and Relating in Patient and Analyst

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