Transformations of the Interpersonal Field

On Coming into Possession of Oneself: Transformations of the Interpersonal Field is Donnel B. Stern’s fifth authored book, and his latest contribution to the kind of understanding of psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic process offered by field theory. Stern’s book is essential for all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists wishing to understand how the analyst’s interventions grow from the analyst’s emotional involvement in the clinical process. This presentation will begin with an overview of the book’s contents, followed by a question and answer segment with the audience, and then a presentation of one of the book’s clinical chapters, again followed by Q and A.

Donnel B. Stern, PhD is Training and Supervising Analyst at the William Alanson White Institute; and Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychology and Clinical Consultant at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He is Founder and Editor of a book series at Routledge, “Psychoanalysis in a New Key,” which has 90 books in print. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of the journal Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He has published 100 psychoanalytic articles and book chapters since he began to write about unformulated experience in his first article in 1983. He has authored five psychoanalytic books and co-edited four others. His first authored book was Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis (1983), which was followed by Partners in Thought: Working with Unformulated Experience, Dissociation, and Enactment (2010); Relational Freedom: Emergent Properties of the Interpersonal Field (2015);The Infinity of the Unsaid: Unformulated Experience, Language, and the Nonverbal (2019) and On Coming into Possession of Oneself: Transformations of the Interpersonal Field (2024). His four co-edited books are presentations of the theory and practice of interpersonal psychoanalysis. Dr. Stern speaks, teaches, and supervises around the world, is in private practice in New York City, and leads private study groups.