Routledge Relational Freedom: Emergent Properties of the Interpersonal Field (Psychoanalysis in a New Key Book Series)

Relational Freedom: Emergent Properties of the Interpersonal Field addresses the interpersonal field in clinical psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, especially the emergent qualities of the field. The book builds on the foundation of unformulated experience, dissociation, and enactment defined and explored in Stern’s previous, widely read books. Stern never considers the analyst or the patient alone; all clinical events take place between them and involve them both. Their conscious and unconscious conduct and experience are the field’s substance. We can say that the changing nature of the field determines the experience that patient and analyst can create in one another’s presence; but we can also say that the therapeutic dyad, simply by doing their work together, ceaselessly configures and reconfigures the field. "Relational freedom" is Stern’s own interpersonal and relational conception of the field, which he compares, along with other varieties of interpersonal/relational field theory, to the work of Bionian field theorists such as Madeleine and Willy Baranger, and Antonino Ferro. Other chapters concern the role of the field in accessing the frozen experience of trauma, in creating theories of therapeutic technique, evaluating quantitative psychotherapy research, evaluating the utility of the concept of unconscious phantasy, treating the hard-to-engage patient, and in devising the ideal psychoanalytic institute. Relational Freedom is a clear, authoritative, and impassioned statement of the current state of interpersonal and relational psychoanalytic theory and clinical thinking. It will interest anyone who wants to stay up to date with current developments in American psychoanalysis, and for those newer to the field it will serve as an introduction to many of the important questions in contemporary psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysts and psychotherapists of all kinds will profit from the book’s thoughtful discussions of clinical problems and quandaries. Donnel B. Stern, Ph.D.., a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist in private practice in New York City, serves as Training and Supervising Analyst at the William Alanson White Institute, and Adjunct Clinical Professor and Consultant at the NYU Postodoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He is the founder and editor of "Psychoanalysis in a New Key," a book series published by Routledge. Review "Stern has the delightful skill of writing with an elegance that enables  a reader such as me, who is not steeped in the psychoanalytical tradition, to readily grasp quite elusive and complex ideas and apply them to our own thinking as a therapist...I am left feeling that it has definitely been a worthwhile read." - Steve Page, Therapy Today "Donnel Stern’s Relational Freedom is a welcome contribution to the field of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in which he reinvents the concept of emergence as the experiential component of the interpersonal field, and brings the concept to life in his many, in depth, clinical discussions. What I find truly remarkable about this book is that it offers a way of encompassing relational theory, field theory, Bionian concepts, and modern Freudian thinking, while so many others deal with these perspectives as if they are at war with one another." - Thomas Ogden, M. D., Personal and Supervising Analyst, Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California  "Stern's great ability to make very complex concepts comprehensible is once again in evidence in this marvelous book of rare depth. This is the book every "insider" will want to read and secretly wish they had written....It is replete with delightful clinical vignettes that reveal the author's method of working: free, creative, unconstrained by preconstructed models, and always open to whatever emerges in psychoanalytic session (or as Bion would put it to whatever 'evolves' in the session). Rarely have I felt my heart race whilst reading clinical material and such an urge