ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Donnel Stern writes about analytic process and the ideal conditions for fruitful psychoanalytic work. In a psychoanalytic context, he argues, most of the analyst's most significant perceptions arise without conscious intention. Stern has written a theory of unconsciousness as unformulated experience, by which he means that unconsciousness is not fully formed meaning hidden away in the mind, but potential experience, a vaguely organized, global, nonideational, affective state. Like Edgar Levenson and other interpersonalists, Stern resists the closure of too readily making sense of the clinical data. Stern does not depend for his understanding of the patient on explicit, conscious dependence on theories of development or technique. Stern argues that for clinical experience to be richest, the analyst must be free to engage the patient with a spontaneity that allows for the emergence of unbidden perceptions that may be completely unexpected.
