ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a theory of the significance of what Stern calls 'witnessing'. Donnel B. Stern calls 'witnessing'. Stern, along with Philip Bromberg, has been the contemporary interpersonalist most identified with dissociation and the concept of the multiple self. In the work of both writers, dissociation applies not only to life-threatening trauma, but is also the way defense is conceptualized in a model in which the content of the unconscious is not fully formed and hidden, but potential experience that remains to be given explicit meaning. Dissociation, in other words, rather than being the exclusion from awareness of existing unconscious content, is the unconsciously motivated refusal to create experience in the first place. Stern has always had a strong interest in the relationship of psychoanalysis with hermeneutics, language literature, and certain aspects of academic psychology. He has written on theory and clinical practice in mutual enactment, work that is also anchored in the concepts of dissociation and unformulated experience.
