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Presents
On Coming Into Possession of Oneself
Transformations of the Interpersonal Field
A Book Talk with Donnel B. Stern, PhD
moderated by
CJ Healy, M.A.
Sunday
March 23, 2025
11:00 AM to 1:00 PM, Eastern Time
Online via Zoom
Tickets available HERE
Direct link: https://event.newschool.edu/donnelbstern
General Admission: $30
New School students and current institute candidates: Free (please email NSSRFerencziCenter@gmail.com to reserve)
CE Credits (2 hours) available for
New York Psychologists, Social Workers, and MHCs
APA CE credits also available for Psychologists
Participants must the attend the seminar in its entirety to receive CE credits. Attendance will be recorded to track each participant’s entry and exit time.
* For students and practitioners of all levels *
This seminar introduces Dr. Stern’s latest contribution to the understanding of psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic processes in his newest book, On Coming Into Possession of Oneself: Transformations of the Interpersonal Field. Through theory and clinical vignettes, Stern explores how the analyst’s interventions emerge from their own emotional involvement in the clinical process. In this presentation, Dr. Stern will explore with participants his understanding of therapeutic action, which, as he will demonstrate, can be enriched by adopting the conceptual framework offered by field theory.
About the book, from the publisher
Stern anchors his understanding of therapeutic action in the freedom of both patient and analyst to create a meaningful experience with minimum inhibition. The field’s capacity to generate meaning—and thus to make possible fully realized human living—rows from its freedom to respond spontaneously to the feelings, wants, and needs of its participants. To whatever extent this spontaneity is diminished, as it is in unconscious mutual enactment, we can be sure that some part of the field is frozen or otherwise rigidified. This position serves as the foundation of the psychoanalysis that Stern practices. The analyst aims to feel their way into compromises in the field, and then do whatever they can to grasp and dissolve them, knowing that they will have to be visited repeatedly, and dissolved again. These insights into interpersonal and relational field theory lead to descriptions of clinical interventions that are focused on the moment-to-moment emotional experience of both the patient and the analyst.
Learning Objectives
At the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:
- Understand and apply to their clinical practice the analyst’s witnessing of the patient.
- Understand and apply to their clinical practice the concept of unformulated experience.
- Understand and apply to their clinical practice the conception of psychoanalysis anchored in the idea of the interpersonal field.
Donnel B Stern, PhD. is a Training and Supervising Analyst and Faculty at the William Alanson White Institute in New York City; and Adjunct Clinical Professor and Clinical Consultant, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He is Founder and Editor of the “Psychoanalysis in a New Key” book series from Routledge, which has 90 titles in print. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He has published five books, the most recent of which, On Coming into Possession of Oneself: Transformations of the Interpersonal Field, is the occasion for this presentation. He has also co-edited four books about the theory and practice of interpersonal psychoanalysis. He is in private practice in New York City.
In discussion with
CJ Healy, M.A. is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Clinical Psychology Ph.D. program at the New School for Social Research in New York. CJ is a member of the Advisory Board and Organizing Committee of the Sándor Ferenczi Center, a member of the Trauma and Affective Psychophysiology Lab under the mentorship of Wendy D’Andrea, Ph.D., and a member of the Trainee Editorial Board of the journal Psychedelic Medicine. CJ was also a recipient of a Fellowship from the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in 2021-2022, a recipient of a Scholars Award from the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA Division 39) in 2023-2024, and a recipient of the New School for Social Research Outstanding Graduate Student Award in 2024 for conceptualizing, developing, and teaching the undergraduate course “Psychedelics and Psychology,” the university’s first course on psychedelic science in the field of psychology. CJ is currently a psychology intern at Lenox Hill Hospital.
Participants with physical or sensory disabilities are encouraged to contact the CE committee members at least 2 weeks in advance of the event to plan for appropriate accommodations. Please contact us via phone or email:
Nichelle Horlacher, Department Secretary: T 212.229.5727 x3223
Miriam Steele, Ph.D. steelem@newschool.edu
Howard Steele, Ph.D. steeleh@newschool.edu
Netta Keesom, MA, Student Coordinator. NSSRFerencziCenter@gmail.com
Participants may also contact CE committee members with any concerns. You may also share concerns when you receive your evaluation form after the event.
Tickets may be refunded up to 24 hours prior to the start of the event.
Please email NSSRFerencziCenter@gmail.com to cancel your ticket and request a refund.
The New School for Social Research, Department of Psychology SW CPE is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Social Work as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers #0199.
The New School for Social Research, Department of Psychology is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Mental Health Practitioners as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed mental health counselors. #MHC-0120.
The New School of Social Research, Department of Psychology is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Psychology as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed psychologists #PSY-0146.
The New School for Social Research, Department of Psychology is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists.
The New School for Social Research Clinical Psychology Department maintains responsibility for this program and its content.
The sponsors of this event report no conflicts of interest or commercial support.
Lewis Aron (1952-2019)
Written by Adrienne Harris
On Thursday, February 28, 2019, our dear colleague and friend and leader and brave man, Lewis Aron, died in New York City. It was the end we had all feared and mostly denied, as we accompanied Lew on a long and courageous voyage fighting and living with a life-threatening cancer.
There is so much to say about Lew’s life and work but I want to begin with his way of combatting and living with his illness. He was brave but most powerfully he was generous with family, friends and colleagues. He has provided an amazing lesson in how to be open and available and at the same time continue to work for health and survival. We badly need, in our field, to be able to face difficulty, support each other as life and work patterns are put in question, and to create a climate of honesty and responsibility.
Yesterday I taught a class in which we were reading Ghent’s great paper on submission and surrender. I feel such admiration and love for Lew as he went through the health circumstance and death he had been handed. Surrender is not giving up. It is acceptance. It is opening to experience and what it will teach you.
When I think of his work life and when I read the wonderful messages of love and admiration, I am struck by the mixture of pleasure and admiration in so many reminiscences. He had a rock band. Sig. He could build and maintain a serious psychoanalytic institution. He could work in systems – local and national. He built structures.
Our work together included the Ferenczi Conferences starting in 1991, the Sandor Ferenczi Center beginning in 2008 with Jeremy Safran and me, the Relational Perspectives Book Series, with Steve from the inception, later with me, and adding Steve Kuchuck and Eyal Rozmarin. That series is closing in on 100 volumes.
The work we did to bring the first conference on Sandor Ferenczi to the US was motivated – dictated one might say – by Steve Mitchell. Cannot speak for Lew but I had no idea who Ferenczi was. Steve was so amazingly good at empowering people, sending them on various errands, and so we did a conference – held in NYC – and sat in the audience, amazed at the European analysts, who in so many ways had kept the tradition and writings and work of Ferenczi alive. Judit Mészarós, André Haynal, György Hidas, Judith Dupont joined with American analysts; Stephen Mitchell, Bromberg, Shapiro, Therese Ragen, Arnold Rachman, Benjamin Wolstein, Jay Frankel, Christofer Fortune and William Brennan.
For me, it was an astonishing and life-changing introduction to Ferenczi and his work. I know Lew was technically my colleague in that venture but for me it was so new. I do think of him as also my guide into a new and amazing world. My image for that event is that it was like plate tectonics. Continents that were now far apart had once been joined. I knew my ancestors in psychoanalysis. I knew where object relations came from. Grandfather Ferenczi. Being part of that discovery with Lew was really wonderful, unexpected and surprising. Really so much of his work life and career had that effect and involvement.
In 2009, with Jeremy Safran, Lew Aron and I inaugurated the Sandor Ferenczi Center at The New School. Over a decade we developed programs, lectures, workshops devoted to Ferenczi’s model of interaction, elasticity of technique, trauma focused treatment and other psychoanalytic projects. We thought of this project as the site of ideals and projects at the heart of the historic mission of The New School and as a site for innovations in psychoanalysis along the lines of Ferenczi. It is shocking beyond measure that both my colleagues died within this past year. Miriam Steele has joined the center representing The New School faculty. We have enlarged the board and we go in remembering Lew and Jeremy and working within their vision. But it has been overwhelming to absorb both these losses. With regard to Lew, I/we are at the beginning.
There is a lot to remember and hold tight to as we register our loss of this amazing person. His career as a psychoanalytic educator, his director of institutions and so many structures: Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Div. 39, IARPP, and for over two decades, NYU Postdoc.
His career as a psychoanalytic educator, director of institutions and so many structures: Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Div 39, IARPP and others were handled with efficiency and grace. And of course there was his ability to take on so much of the continuation of Mitchell’s very premature death, through mentorship of students – local, national and international and an astonishing vocation as a teacher of psychoanalysis in a series of study groups which continued to meet right into January of this year.
Talk about playing well with others. He had fun. He was playful and funny, all the while accomplishing a stunning array of tasks, books, and creative endeavors.
We are all wishing that he could have had more time. There was more to do and more love to participate in. I think of the wonderful pleasure of Lew’s being with Galit’s children, Yali and Emma, at their bar and bat mitzvahs last summer and how much he helped with their preparation. And I know from my last visits with Lew that he was incredibly proud of how deeply his children Kiara, Raffi and Benjamin were participating in his care.
We hold him close as we say goodbye. We can only sit with such admiration and care for Galit Atlas who has held so much in these past years AND created with Lew a life of work and love.