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Relational and intersubjective developments · Chapter 35
Bromberg and Donnel Stern: dissociation, self-states and experience not yet in words
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Chapter contents
- From a hidden content to a problem of availability
- Bromberg: multiplicity without fragmentation as the ideal
- An original room today: two accounts that cannot meet
- Safety and surprise
- Stern: unformulated experience
- An original example of formulation rather than excavation
- The boundary between clinical theory and suggestive practice
- What they changed
- Source and reading notes
From a hidden content to a problem of availability
Repression suggests that some psychological material is kept from awareness through conflict. Philip Bromberg and Donnel Stern ask a related but different question: what happens when aspects of experience cannot yet be held together or formulated? Their work develops within interpersonal and relational traditions, with historical links to dissociation and trauma. It does not require abandoning conflict; it questions the assumption that the relevant experience already exists as a coherent hidden sentence. [13] [151]
In plain English: the therapist may not be trying to uncover a secret the patient knows somewhere inside. The work may help an experience become thinkable for the first time.
Bromberg: multiplicity without fragmentation as the ideal
Bromberg describes the self through multiple states rather than one seamless entity. Ordinary health includes movement among states while retaining enough continuity and communication. Dissociation can protect continuity by keeping incompatible experiences apart, but rigid separation narrows what a person can know, feel and live. His phrase standing in the spaces points toward increased capacity to inhabit difference without losing oneself. It is not a diagnostic claim that everyone has dissociative identity disorder. [13] [105]
A patient who is fiercely independent on Monday and desperately dependent on Thursday may experience each state as the whole truth. Asking which is the real person misses the problem. The clinician explores whether both can become available without forcing premature coherence.
An original room today: two accounts that cannot meet
Elena says, “I have never needed much from anybody.” Two sessions earlier she described feeling unreal after a friend went away. The therapist does not present the earlier statement as a contradiction that proves dishonesty.
Therapist: “Today the part of your experience that wanted company seems very far away. What is it like to hear me mention it?”
Elena: “Embarrassing. I hardly recognize the person who said that.”
Therapist: “Can we be curious about both without asking you to become the person who needs company all the time?”
She can tolerate a little of the earlier loneliness, then becomes irritated. The clinician follows the shift. The aim is not maximum disclosure but greater communication among experiences that have been mutually excluding. If the clinician’s wording itself humiliates her, that contribution is part of the inquiry.
Safety and surprise
Bromberg’s clinical writing explores how change may require encountering disowned experience without reproducing overwhelming disruption. Safety is not absolute predictability; total predictability may preserve the old organization. But surprise is not an intervention to manufacture indiscriminately. A clinician needs competence, a dependable frame and sensitivity to when novelty becomes intolerable. [105]
In plain English: enough steadiness to encounter something unfamiliar, not a dramatic challenge designed to break through a defense.
Stern: unformulated experience
Donnel B. Stern’s unformulated experience concerns meanings that have not become articulated. Dissociation can constrain what is available for formulation, while changes in the interpersonal field can permit new experience and imagination. Stern’s later writing develops how participation in a different kind of relationship can precede explicit understanding. This is a particular theory of unconscious process, not a universal replacement for repression. [151] [152] [153]
In plain English: I may first discover that I can be uncertain with you, and only then discover what I was feeling. The relationship changes what can come into view.
The field here is not an invisible substance between people. It describes an interpersonal organization of possibilities, constraints and meanings. It differs from Bionian field theories even when the vocabulary overlaps.
An original example of formulation rather than excavation
A patient says a colleague’s compliment felt “off,” but cannot explain why. The clinician initially asks whether it was envy. Nothing useful follows. Returning to the patient’s language, the therapist asks what kind of “off” it was.
The patient recalls feeling briefly displayed, like being used as an example for other staff. The issue becomes less admiration than a loss of privacy and agency. That meaning was not necessarily a fully formed thought waiting to be retrieved. It develops through attention, recollection, language and the relational conditions of the conversation.
A therapist can overreach here too. The new account may be plausible without being a complete or objectively verified explanation of the colleague’s intention. Formulating experience is not creating historical certainty.
The boundary between clinical theory and suggestive practice
These traditions do not justify inventing hidden trauma because a person feels blank or inconsistent. The clinician should distinguish dissociation, ordinary forgetting, attentional differences, exhaustion, substances and other possibilities. Emerging imagery is not proof of an event. Nor should the therapist insist that emotionally vivid material is truer than a quieter account. [13]
What they changed
They gave analysts a richer vocabulary for discontinuity, not-yet-symbolized experience and the role of participation in making meaning. The practical inheritance is often a change in the question: not only “What are you defending against?” but “What cannot yet be experienced alongside what is here?”
Study task: compare repression, dissociation and unformulated experience without treating them as synonyms. In the compliment scene, name a clinical inference, an observed event and an interpretation of another person’s motive. Keep all three separate.
Source and reading notes
Independent educational synthesis. Fictional conversations illustrate reasoning. Review scopes describe the material consulted; they do not certify all clinical claims.
Standing in the Spaces: Essays on Clinical Process, Trauma and Dissociation (opens in a new tab)
Publisher contents checked
Publisher description and table of contents reviewed. Chapters were not read.
Publisher description, contents and original/later edition distinction checked. Broad causal assertions in promotional copy not adopted.
Recorded check: 2026-10-15. Source used for this record (opens in a new tab)
Pathway source review: carried forward
contents: Publisher description, contents and original/later edition distinction checked. Broad causal assertions in promotional copy not adopted.
carried-forward; not independently rechecked in finishing pass · Recorded date: 2026-10-15
Scope concerns what was consulted; it is not approval of every claim or author endorsement.
Further reading for psychodynamic history, theory and practice.
Access depends on the destination; saving a link does not unlock paid material.
Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis (opens in a new tab)
Publisher description checked
Publisher, catalog, or organizer description reviewed. The work itself was not read, watched, or heard.
Publisher description and bibliographic details checked; this research pass did not review the full book.
Recorded check: 2026-10-14. Source used for this record (opens in a new tab)
Pathway source review: carried forward
description: Publisher description and bibliographic details checked; this research pass did not review the full book.
carried-forward from earlier Learn library; not a new full-text review
Scope concerns what was consulted; it is not approval of every claim or author endorsement.
Examines experience that has not yet been articulated and the relational conditions of meaning-making.
contemporary theory, clinical formulation
Purchase or library
The Shadow of the Tsunami and the Growth of the Relational Mind (opens in a new tab)
Review scope recorded
See the pathway review note for the exact material consulted.
Correct title matched to publisher destination. A different ISBN-like route returned Awakening the Dreamer and is not used.
Recorded check: 2026-10-15. Source used for this record (opens in a new tab)
Pathway source review: carried forward
publisher-description-and-contents: Correct title matched to publisher destination. A different ISBN-like route returned Awakening the Dreamer and is not used.
carried-forward; not independently rechecked in finishing pass · Recorded date: 2026-10-15
Scope concerns what was consulted; it is not approval of every claim or author endorsement.
Further reading for psychodynamic history, theory and practice.
Access depends on the destination; saving a link does not unlock paid material.
On Coming into Possession of Oneself: Transformations of the Interpersonal Field (opens in a new tab)
Publisher description checked
Publisher, catalog, or organizer description reviewed. The work itself was not read, watched, or heard.
Publisher description and bibliographic details checked; this research pass did not review the full book.
Recorded check: 2026-10-14. Source used for this record (opens in a new tab)
Pathway source review: carried forward
description: Publisher description and bibliographic details checked; this research pass did not review the full book.
carried-forward from earlier Learn library; not a new full-text review
Scope concerns what was consulted; it is not approval of every claim or author endorsement.
Develops contemporary interpersonal field theory, meaning-making, and the analyst’s emotional participation.
contemporary theory, clinical formulation
Purchase or library
What does “unconscious” mean? Unformulated experience and the interpersonal field (opens in a new tab)
Abstract checked
Abstract or official summary reviewed. Full paper not appraised.
PubMed and the primary publisher abstract checked for the author’s stated 2026 theoretical revision. Full paper not reviewed; no effectiveness claim or detailed clinical procedure is inferred.
Recorded check: 2026-10-14. Source used for this record (opens in a new tab)
Additional editorial check · 2026-10-15: Abstract checked.
2026 article identity and abstract checked. Supports acknowledging unformulated experience and nonverbal relational change as a distinct perspective, not a universal psychodynamic position.
Pathway source review: carried forward
abstract: PubMed and the primary publisher abstract checked for the author’s stated 2026 theoretical revision. Full paper not reviewed; no effectiveness claim or detailed clinical procedure is inferred.
carried-forward from earlier Learn library; not a new full-text review
Scope concerns what was consulted; it is not approval of every claim or author endorsement.
Stern revisits his theory of unformulated experience and the place of relational and nonverbal change.
unformulated experience, interpersonal field, contemporary theory
Free abstract; full text may require institutional access