Review of "The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life"

Daniel Stern's new book, The Present Moment, has already generated in depth analysis and has been seen as an intervention in the ongoing struggle in psychoanalysis regarding the effort to eliminate remnants of Freudian positivism. I refer to Heward Wilkinson's lengthy review essay in the Nov. 2003 issue of the International Journal of Psychotherapy (pp. 235-254). In his review, which is both highly favorable and highly critical, Wilkinson maintains that Stern's formulations incorporate elements of positivism and atomism that reflect the latter's commitment to the Freud legacy in psychoanalysis. In the present review, I describe what I take to be the most significant aspects of the contents of The Present Moment, and assess its general character and great merit. In addition, I explain the important role of Husserlian phenomenology in Stern's viewpoint, which Wilkinson alludes to twice but does not address at all, except to refer to Husserl disparagingly as one who "is also reductive in his way?" (Wilkinson 248).

While I share with Wilkinson the view that the future of psychoanalysis depends on fully transcending positivism, I reject his view on how to overcome those positivist elements (which as I show below he mistakenly attributes to Stern) while retaining Stern's "breakthrough" (Wilkinson). Unfortunately, however, Wilkinson slights the pervasive presence of elements of Husserlian phenomenology in Stern. Because Wilkinson does not see the value of specifically Husserlian phenomenology, he does not see that the antidote within Stern's thinking is an expanded role for phenomenology rather than, as he proposes, a move towards what I (and others) view as Heideggerean linguistic reductionism? (e.g., see Wilkinson 253).

What, then, is "the present moment", and what is its significance for psychoanalysis? How has Stern been influenced by Husserl?

 The present moment is understood by Stern to be a moment of intersubjective lived experience (Stern's overriding emphasis is on experience in the consulting room between analyst and patient). Present moments are lived nonconsciously on the level of implicit, rather than explicit, i.e., conscious, verbalized, or verbalizable, experience. Implicit experience is nonconscious rather than unconscious in that it is not repressed and is not subject to psychic resistance. (Stern's book is replete with extensive examples and descriptions of present moments derived from the method, fully conceptualized in the book's appendix, of "microanlysis" of analyst-patient dialogues and patient recording of daily experiences.)

 In focusing on nonconscious, implicit experience, Stern is not rejecting the Freudian unconscious. He does not deny either its existence or its significance for psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Nevertheless, in one of his most revealing metatheoretical statements, he maintains that,

The temporal aspect of the present moment?had to be addressed?After all, the presentness of lived experience is central. This question sent me on an extended learning journey into the realm of phenomenological philosophy?It was there that the hidden but obvious fact that we are psychologically and consciously alive only now became apparent?This is, of course, a radical departure from the path historically taken by most psychologies that put the central emphasis on the past and its influence. It also implies that consciousness, rather than the unconscious is the key mystery, another radical departure?xiv-xv

In thus pointing out in the Preface to The Present Moment that consciousness rather than the unconscious is "the key mystery," Stern might confuse readers subsequently when he focuses, as we have seen, on nonconscious, implicit experience rather than conscious, verbal, explicit experience. The point is, however, that nonconscious, implicit experience is not unconscious dynamically; it is unconscious topographically and, as such, is actually experienced; i.e., it is conscious as a form of experience, though unreflected and nonexplicit. This is consistent (although Stern does not at all discuss this point) with the phenomenological notion of consciousness which is far broader and deeper than the Freudian notion.

Most important for grasping the nature of the present moment is understanding, as Stern points out in the quote above, that present moments have a temporal structure. That structure is such that they bear within them the immediate past and the foreshadowed future. In developing his conception of the temporal structure of experience Stern was profoundly influenced, as he fully acknowledges, by the work of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology For Husserl, there is no "standing now". The present, the 'now' moment, is a process with retentive (immediate past) and protentive (anticipated future) horizons. The present moment is infused with and structured by these flowing temporal horizons, as well as with their experiential content. This flowing process is what Husserl referred to as "erlebnis", a word usually translated from the German as "lived experience." (In the phenomenological-existential perspective, "lived experience" is referred to as "existence"). (Also, although I cannot elaborate here, Stern fully appreciates and uses the Husserlian notion of the intentionality of consciousness.)

Equally important for understanding Stern's formulations is that for him the mutative effect of psychoanalysis occurs in the therapy session in and through present moments. Oddly, Wilkinson does not even mention, let alone discuss, the mutative effect of psychoanalysis. Yet, understanding the mutative effect has been, and is, the holy grail that analytic theoreticians and practitioners have sought for more and more intensively as psychoanalysis has undergone change since Freud and has abandoned Freud's simplistic "where id was there ego shall be"; and in particular, as theorists have gained deeper understanding of the depth dimension of the imbrication of positivism in psychoanalysis. For, if psychoanalysis is not a positivist, physicalist, reductive science, and if, therefore, the mutative effect does not have a causal structure as positivists maintain, how does analysis bring about change in patients? As mentioned above, Wilkinson in his review does not at all touch upon this all-important issue, even though accounting for it is the cornerstone of Stern's perspective.

For Stern, the mutative effect occurs through the attainment, in and through present moments, of what he calls "intersubjective knowing".

 Intersubjective knowing is implicit and nonconscious. It occurs in the here and now, but as Stern points out, the present moment of intersubjective knowing is quite different from "the here and now" as presently understood in psychoanalysis. The difference is that Stern considers the presentness of the present moment to be absolutely crucial in constituting the mutative effect of psychoanalysis. Thus, this effect does not come about through analytic considerations and interventions regarding the here and now of the patient's narrative or the here and now of the relationship between analyst and patient. Rather, the present moment occurs in the heat atnd intensity of the intersubjective field in the present of that heat and intensity. This is correlated with Stern's view that the present moments in analysis that bring about change are nonconscious (rather than unconscious) and are not matters that are subject to repression either before, after, or during their occurrence. In fact, for Stern, intersubjective, implicit knowing is subject, rather, to repression of any attempt to verbalize it; in this way, its authenticity is retained and protected from objectvation. Stern maintains that there is universally in human beings a motivational system the aim of which is intersubjective knowing, i.e., implicit knowing shared by two people; and, that motivational aim is achieved in present moments. In my view, this is the most important contribution in Stern's book in that it comes closer to an explication of the mutative effect of psychoanalysis than previous theories. 

At this point, we can consider the positivist elements in Stern and how they can be most constructively transcended. For, the elements of transcendence are already implicit in the book.

Wilkinson points to three positivist elements in Stern's formulations:   1. Stern maintains a "strong logical behaviorism." Wilkinson's basis for this claim: Stern states that "We are capable of 'reading' other people's intentions and feeling within our bodies what they are feeling [Stern's grammar MN-S]. Not in any mystical way [Wilkinson's italics], but from watching their face, movements, and posture, etc. etc."[I have truncated Wilkinson's quote from Stern on Wilkinson 246]. Wilkinson maintains that Stern partially recognizes "direct mimetic mutual resonance" and that Stern moves towards the recognition that the social basis of mind is prior to, and the logical presupposition of individual conscious awareness and mentality (246).

2. Wilkinson avers that Stern maintains a very simple experience/neuro-process dualism "so that neuro-processes are treated as functionally equivalent to personal phenomenological processes." For Wilkinson, this dualism should point instead "towards interactionism so thoroughgoing that it begins to relativize the position of neuroscience from a phenomenological position" (247).

3. Wilkinson states: "Third, and for my present purpose most important, (for this one is within the phenomenological field and is still atomistic) there is the central atomistic postulate of basic experiential units conceived of as constituted in 'the present moment' by way of a 'lived story'?." (247).

Contrary to Wilkinson, it seems to me that the second point, the claim of neuro-scientific dualism, is the most plausible claim of positivism against Stern.

Regarding Wilkinson's first point, that Stern fails to see that the social basis of mind is prior to individual consciousness, this is in the first place an assumption that needs a rationale that is not provided by Wilkinson. Secondly, many of the finest psychoanalytic theoreticians reject the view that the 'we' is ontologically prior to the 'I'; for example, Jessica Benjamin shows in her richly argued books that psychoanalysis, to remain psychoanalysis, must recognize both intra- and intersubjective phenomena, where neither precedes the other. Indeed, here psychoanalysis is homologous not with the Heideggerean insistence on the priority of the "we" and on language as the "house of being" and bearer of the "we'; rather, psychoanalysis is homologous with Husserlian phenomenology which is a philosophic stance recognizes the irreducible interplay of individual and socius where neither has priority over the other. As Daniel Stern wrote in his (1985) The Interpersonal World of the Infant (New York: Basic Books, 1985), "While intersubjective relatedness transforms the interpersonal world, however, core-relatedness continues. Intersubjective relatedness does not displace it; nothing ever will. It is the existential bedrock of interpersonal relations" (125). Moreover, core relatedness presupposes the "core self" (pp. 26-27).

Wilkinson's third point is that Stern's conception of basic experiential units constituted in present moments by way of lived stories is atomistic. Stern writes, however, that: "The problem with chronos [objective time, clock time] is that if there is no now long enough that something can unfold in it, there can be no direct experience?Also, life-as-lived is not experienced as a continuous flow. Rather, it is felt to be discontinuous, made up of incidents and events separated in time but also somehow connected" (6). Thus, while on one hand Stern maintains that "life as lived is not experienced as an inexorably continuous flow", on the other hand he urges this against a reductive, objectified time. Clock time flows inexorably continuously precisely because it is objectified and as such senseless and devoid of significance. Thus also, Wilkinson's use of objectified language, "basic experiential units" taken out of the rich context provided by Stern is tendentious--it is itself an objectification of Stern's view of the temporality of lived experience.

Finally, in his second point, Wilkinson alleges that Stern posits a simple experience/neuro-process dualism. It is indeed the case that throughout the book Stern cites and explicates neurological correlates of the processes in the phenomenal, i.e., experiential mind. Why does Stern do this? Certainly, that he does strongly suggests a form of mind-brain dualism. The problem of dualism (I add) is that it threatens to devolve, as it did in Cartesianism, into the physicalist reductionism of scientism. Wilkinson advocates "interactionism" as an antidote to dualism.

However, Stern's presentation of the relevant material indicates that he is not a mind-brain dualist. Stern's Husserlian orientation rules out dualism, for, Husserlian phenomenology is a monistic stance such that the person is a psychophysical unity. Stern's lengthiest excursus into neurobiological material is in Chapter Five, "The Intersubjective Matrix" in the sub-section, "Evidence for the Intersubjective Matrix." This sub-section is itself divided into two sections: "Neuroscientific Evidence" and "Support from Phenomenology." "Neuroscientific Evidence" is a lengthy discussion of mirror neurons and their role in intersubjective experience, as well as other recent neuroscientific findings. Stern's view of the relation between these findings and human phenomenal experience is expressed, for example, when, discussing his notion that there are mechanisms available for dyadic coordination between persons, he writes that "There is another finding that may serve as a neural correlate for intersubjectivty." The term "correlate" does not equate with cause in the positivist sense, nor does it necessarily imply dualism. Indeed, throughout the chapter, and the book as a whole, Stern's discussion of these factors is embedded in discussions of complex interactive feedback processes between neurological structures and processes and intersubjective, phenomenal, interactive processes.

In addition, in the section on "Support from Phenomenology," Stern discusses various aspects of Husserlian phenomenology and references writings by Husserl scholars who have themselves engaged the literature and findings of cognitive neuroscience, for example the well-known and much published Husserl scholar Dan Zahavi. These scholars and interpreters of the relation between Husserlian phenomenology and cognitive neurosciences are attempting to bridge the gap non-dualistically and non-reductively between the phenomenality of experience and the neurological structuration that correlates with that phenomenality. [i]

The point that I am progressing towards is as follows: All of these writings and discussions in the literature on neurobiological correlates of phenomenal experience are, from a phenomenological perspective, important and exciting, with one overriding caveat:

In the first chapter of The Present Moment, "The Problem of 'Now'", in presenting "a minimal list of the features of a clinically relevant present moment", Stern writes that the third feature is as follows: "The felt experience of the present moment is whatever is in awareness now, during the moment being lived [Stern's emphasis]. In discussing the problem of objectivating present moments subsequent to experiencing them, Stern writes: "This natural problem is why Husserl insisted that to capture phenomenal experience and examine it for itself, we have to put a bracket (Husserl's epoche) around it to protect it from being "explained away" at another level" (33). This is an accurate presentation of the meaning of the epoche or suspension of ontological commitments that is the inaugural act of phenomenological philosophizing--it prevents a metabasis eis allo genus, i.e., it prevents a positivist, or dualist, reduction of the phenomenal to the naturalistic.

Given this, to make his work internally consistent, Stern needs to make it clear that he as phenomenological philosopher-psychoanalyst stands always within the phenomenological attitude, the epoche. Otherwise, his excursions into neurobiology give the unfortunate impression of being both ad hoc and defensively motivated. For this, the antidote is not less Husserlian phenomenology, but more thoroughgoing and consistent work within the phenomenological epoche.

With this, I leave you to read this marvelous book 

© 2005 Marilyn Nissim-Sabat

Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, Ph.D., M.S.W., Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, Lewis University, Romeoville, IL , Clinical Social Worker, private practice in psychodynamic psychotherapy, Chicago, IL, Member Executive Board, Assoc. for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry