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