Houston Psychoanalytic Society

Online Conference

Imagination, Interpretation, and the Analytic Field

Donnel B. Stern, PhD

with discussion by Jon G. Allen, PhD

Saturday, November 2, 2024

10:00 AM - 2:30 PM Central Time

4 CME/CE/CEUs

Live via Zoom

*Pre-Registration required for Zoom invitation

This event will not be recorded

Registration Fees

HPS Active Member: $120

HPS Student Member: $60

Non-Member: $140

Instructional Level: Beginner - Advanced

In my first model of unformulated experience (Stern, 1983, 1997), my intention was to study our capacity to reflect on our own experience; and that meant that the boundary between formulated and unformulated experience needed to be defined by verbal language: My first model held that if you can think or speak about a meaning in the reflective terms of verbal language, the meaning is formulated; if you cannot reflect on the meaning in verbal language, the meaning remains unformulated. Now, though, I think of the boundary between formulated and unformulated experience differently. Now I think of it in terms of the degree of personal meaningfulness of unformulated experience: Formulation is a matter of becoming someone for whom the experience in question is meaningful. One crosses the threshold into explicitly meaningful experience when one can accept the meaning in question. If one can accept it, one can use it in the construction of spontaneous, creative living. The formulation of experience is therefore the imaginative transformation of not-me into feels-like-me. The crucial point is not that particular, new experiences are given shape, but that one becomes the new and slightly different person who can shape experience in that new way.

AGENDA

10:00am-10:10am Welcome, upcoming programs, conference logistics, introduction of speakers

10:10am-12:00pm Presentation (Stern)

12:00pm-12:30pm BREAK

12:30pm-1:45pm Presentation (Stern)

1:45pm-2:00pm Discussion (Allen)

2:00pm-2:30pm Q&A with audience, conference evaluation

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After attending the program in its entirety, attendees will be able to:

1. Assess the interpersonal field in their own clinical work to make judgments about their own participation in unconscious enactments.
2. Describe their clinical interventions as expressions of the interpersonal field.
3. Describe the clinical process they construct with their patients as expressions of the interpersonal field.
4. Analyze their clinical interpretations as mutually constructed by themselves and the patient.

Presenter

Donnel B. Stern, Ph.D. is Training and Supervising Analyst at the William Alanson White Institute in New York City; and Clinical Professor of Psychology and Clinical Consultant at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He is the Founder and Editor of a book series at Routledge, "Psychoanalysis in a New Key,” which has over 80 books in print. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of the journal Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He has published articles and book chapters for over 40 years, and has co-edited four books and authored four others, the most recent of which is The Infinity of the Unsaid: Unformulated Experience, Language, and the Nonverbal (Routledge, 2019). He is in private practice in New York City, where he sees adults and adolescents and leads private study groups.

Discussant

Jon G. Allen, Ph.D., is Clinical Professor on the Voluntary Faculty, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas; an honorary faculty member of the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies; and adjunct faculty of the Institute for Spirituality and Health, Texas Medical Center. He spent 40 years in clinical practice at Menninger Clinic, where he helped to develop an intensive inpatient treatment program for trauma, and created what became a hospital-wide psychoeducational program on recovering from trauma. Now retired from clinical practice, he continues to teach, write, and consult with psychotherapists. He has authored 7 books and numerous journal articles, coauthored 3 books, and co-edited 3 books, focused primarily on trauma, mentalizing, and the patient-therapist relationship. In recent years, Dr. Allen has become interested in relational psychoanalytic concepts and integrated these ideas into his writing, including Stern's model of unformulated experience. Dr. Allen's forthcoming book is Bringing Psychotherapy Back to Life.

REFERENCES

Stern, D.B. (2023). Distance and relation: Emerging from embeddedness in the other. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 71: 641-668. 

Stern, D.B. (2022). Feels like me: Formulating the embodied mind. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 42: 232-243.

Stern, D.B. (2022). On coming into possession of oneself: Witnessing and the formulation of experience. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 91:4: 639-667.