My lovely mate, Jim, has written a stunning review of this important book by the late and much lamented Daniel Stern.
To be unaware of developments in interpersonal psychology and psychotherapy is to miss a big trick about how to be a better human being. Yes, some of it is nonsense and some of it is wish-fulfillment writ large. But as I have personally experienced in my own training as a psychotherapist and, most particularly in my many discussions with Jim, there is also here the beginnings of a map about how to be more authentically, human. Anything contributing to such knowledge is most welcome here! Enjoy!
‘Forms
of vitality: exploring dynamic experience in psychology, the arts,
psychotherapy and development’, by Daniel N. Stern,
Oxford University Press, 2010
Review
by Jim Davis, TSTA
One of my fundamental beliefs as a
transactional analysis psychotherapist is in the value of being open to
influence from other approaches and other areas of study, in order to elaborate
and enrich our body of knowledge and practice.
The work of Daniel Stern (see bibliography below) is one of the most
significant examples of this for me. His
oeuvre spans infant observation research, neuroscience, psychodynamic and
phenomenological psychotherapy, behavioral psychology, and the performing arts!
I first encountered his writing during my
training as a transactional analyst in the 1980s, when I found his book ‘The
Interpersonal world of the infant: a view from psychoanalysis and developmental
psychology’ lying on the floor of my trainer’s rooms. I read it with a passion – if my trainer was
reading it then it must be good - and since then it has provided me with one of
the most important foundations of my understanding of child development and the
nature of the self, with significant implications for my work as an adult
psychotherapist. It was therefore an
especial delight and felt privilege when asked by Celia Simpson to review his
most recent book ‘Forms of Vitality’.
As you may know Daniel Stern died in
November this year, and as I write I feel a sense of loss – even though my
acquaintance with him is solely via his writing – in remembering the warmth,
handsome looks, aliveness and wisdom that I saw in the photographs of him in
the flyleaf covers of ‘Interpersonal world’ and his later book ‘The present
moment’, and also the fact that this book will be his last gift to me.
To be honest I have struggled to do justice
to the breadth and depth of his book in the space allotted to me in this
review. Maybe the first thing to say,
not unlike Mr. Bean’s naïve description of the painting ‘Whistler’s mother’ to
the New York art cognoscenti, is that it is big! In his introduction to the book Stern
expresses his hope that it will be useful for understanding emotion theory,
memory structure, social communication and psychotherapeutic theory and practice,
and in developing his ideas on ‘vitality’ he draws upon this broad range of areas
of study. This breadth of ideas is matched by the depth of the book’s focus on the deep structures that shape all
human experience and expression – whether that of human evolution, early infant
development, neurophysiology or here-and-now phenomenological experience.
What makes the book original, impressive
and thoroughly integrative is the way Stern addresses the topic of ‘vitality’
from phenomenological, cognitive and psychodynamic perspectives, from both the
science of neurophysiology and the aesthetics of artistic performance, not to
mention infant observation research and the implications for psychotherapeutic
work!
The books breadth and depth of its scope,
is, paradoxically, not reflected in its length – merely a hundred and fifty A5
pages! The result, for me, is an
inspiring and ambitious, if at times intensely detailed and demanding - but
worthwhile - read. It will I am sure be
of deep interest to anybody wanting to understand more about the fundamental
nature of human subjective experience, intersubjectivity (particularly in the
sense of the sharing of internal states), implicit relational knowing, non-verbal
communication or, to use transactional analysis terminology – stimulus and
recognition hungers, ulterior transactions, second and third order ego states,
physis or the advantages of games.
The key idea in this book of Sterns is that
of ‘dynamic forms of vitality’, a development of an idea he first introduced
(as ‘vitality affects’) in ‘Interpersonal World of the infant’. Stern added the new term ‘vitality affects’ both
to describe a quality of experience of the infant different from categorical
affects (or feelings as conventionally understood) and in order to understand
the non-verbal experiences involved in affect attunement of early infant/mother
interactions. In addressing the question of how mother’s attune (or not) to their
babies within an intersubjective relationship (ie one in which there is a
sharing of internal states as opposed to simple imitation) Stern introduces the
idea of cross-modal attunement. Thus
where a mother is attuning to her baby Stern suggests that this is accomplished
by a sharing of a corresponding response in a different modality to the baby’s expression. For example, the mothers gesture (eg sudden
raising of arms) or change of facial expression (eg raising of eyebrows,
widening of eyes) in response to the rising pitch of the baby’s vocal exclamation.
Vitality affects comprise the form of expression ie sudden raising,
widening, rising pitch in different modalities (gesture, facial expression, and
vocalization) and it is in responding from a different/cross modality that the
mother provides affect attunement. What is important is whether the mother
matches the dynamic features of how
the baby acted, the same form of
vitality, but in a different
modality. This assures the baby that she
grasps what he did. She does not match
the content and modality of the
infant’s action. Instead she makes her
own choice of modality and content. This
assures the baby that she understood within herself, what it felt like to do
what he did. It is not an imitation
because she put it ‘into her own words’ - it carries her signature, it is
something she felt too, and conveys
the message that she wants a matching
of inner states in order to ‘understand’ and be impacted. Thus the mothers frequent attuning re-establishes
the intersubjective field between them, using vitality forms.
Affect attunement is different from empathy
in that it is largely out of awareness, almost automatic, and unlike empathy which
involves the mediation of cognitive processes.
Affect attunement shares with empathy the initial process of emotional
resonance, but then does something different, namely recasts the experience
into another (non-verbal) form of expression. Similarly emotions are not
adequate to explain this process, because discrete emotional interactions occur
only occasionally, and affective tracking couldn’t occur as a continuous
process if limited simply to emotions.
Metaphors and symbols work in a similar way, an example of which Stern
gives as ‘I was so anxious about how she would greet me, but when she spoke it
was like the sun came out – I melted’.
What is novel and intriguing in Stern’s way
of understanding the (dialectic) process of experiencing and intersubjective sharing of the content of experience
(eg the baby’s experience of pleasure or joy in the example above) is that it
occurs via the form of the experience
(raising, widening in relation to gesture, vocalization, and facial expression)
– where the ‘form’ refers to forms of vitality.
In his writing since ‘Interpersonal world’
Stern develops the idea that vitality affects have a much wider application
than understanding the mother’s affective attunement to her infant. In ‘The present moment’ he points out,
regretfully, that his idea of vitality affects has not been picked up by
clinical, behavioral or neuro-sciences, despite his view of its value in
understanding phenomenological experience as it unfolds, is remembered, and
shared. It seems to me that this book may represent Sterns attempt to remedy
the situation?
His focus in ‘Forms of vitality’ is on
understanding the rarely talked about human experience of vitality, aliveness –
loosely a phenomenal equivalent of Freud’s drives, and perhaps not unlike the
some aspects of the form of physis? In essence ‘dynamic forms of vitality’ are
the basic underlying forms of experience, for example the force, speed and flow of a gesture, the stress of a spoken phrase, the way one breaks into a smile or the speed of it’s decomposition, the manner of shifting in a chair, the shift of a gaze, the explosion of anger, and rush and tumble of thoughts – the
italics here emphasizing the form of
the expression. These examples also
illustrate how all human subjective experience – feelings, actions, thoughts
etc have a dynamic form of vitality, and that this form is the most fundamental
building block of human subjective experience.
Like with his description of the mother’s attunement to the baby, Stern
suggests that all human subjective experience is composed of, remembered, expressed
and shared primarily via, dynamic forms of vitality. Whilst we can communicate
our internal worlds via language and emotions, it is vitality forms that are
the earliest, easiest and most direct path into another’s subjective
experience.
In this book Stern develops his idea of
what forms of vitality consist of further than before, and in doing so he
emphasizes movement – including
physical bodily movement, but also mental movement and imagined movement – as
the key feature of vitality. He adds
what he calls the four ‘daughters’ of movement, namely force, temporal flow,
direction/intentionality, and space. The
elusive quality of the domain of experience referred to in forms of vitality is
probably explained by the fact that these aspects are usually obscured by both
the intensely felt quality of emotions,
and the way in which they are absorbed into the explicit/cognitive meaning given to the experience.
Having introduced vitality forms, Stern
goes on (in part two) of the book, to suggest a neuroscientific underpinning
for forms of vitality, in relation to recent advances that suggest that the
arousal system is the fundamental force for all bodily and mental activity – a
force that throws the motivations (eg sex, hunger, attachment) into action,
triggers emotions, starts up cognitions and initiates movement. He suggests that once an experience activates
the brain, it will leave an encoded vitality dynamic representation of form,
and a content representation, and that the dynamic vitality strand is the most
fundamental and primary. The mothers cross modality attuned response will share
a similar envelope of neural firings to that of the infants, albeit in different
parts of the nervous system depending on the modality chosen.
In part two he also explores vitality forms
in relation to the performance arts – music, dance, theatre and film, which
provide an excellent example of how arousal-related vitality forms affect us,
and he suggests that these arts have paid more attention to this aspect of
experience than has psychology. Like the
sharing of experience between mother and baby, via the form of vitality
affects, so is ‘vitality’ and ‘effect’ created by ‘form’ in art.
I wondered why painting hadn’t been
included in his chapter on the arts, since in a way this art form also is
fundamentally about movement – the movement of the painter in painting, but
even more so in the way in which the form of the painting ‘invites’ the eyes of
the viewer to move, and how this invited movement creates the effect. In this vein my spontaneous association to Mr.
Bean and the painting ‘Whistler’s mother’ intrigued me, and I did a little
research. It turns out that Whistler
actually entitled the work ‘Arrangement in grey and black’, but the art world
didn’t accept what was apparently a portrait being exhibited as a mere
‘arrangement’ and so the painting was renamed. Claude Debussy, however, apparently described
the painting as ‘an experiment in the effect that can be obtained from
different combinations of one colour’.
The cognoscenti focused on the content - a portrait of Whistler’s
mother. Debussy (and Whistler?) focused
on the form ie the effect created, for example, by shading, line and contrast between
very similar but different ‘colourless’ colours (grey, black) not unlike musical
‘colouring’ created via, for example, orchestration or harmonic variation. Perhaps this is another example of the
elusive quality of forms of vitality (composition, line, shading, contrast, colour)
being obscured by content (portrait of a mother).
This takes me back to Stern’s emphasis that
the essence of vitality forms of experience and expression are about the ‘how’
not the ‘what’ or the ‘why’, and about the communication of content via form. If we then shift to the realm of the sharing
of experience in the psychotherapy room, it leads me to wonder about
psychotherapeutic practice as essentially about form more than content, and how
this relates to Robin Hobbes’s idea of psychotherapy as an aesthetic
experience?
In the final section of the book Stern
takes a developmental perspective in terms of where vitality forms begin, and
addresses the question of the implications of vitality forms for the practice
of psychotherapy. He poses the question
of why nature planned for babies not to speak and not to understand words for
the first year or so of their lives. His
answer is that infants have too much to learn about the basic processes and
structures of interpersonal exchange. In
particular they have to learn about dynamic forms of vitality that carry social
behaviours, and they have to learn this before language arrives to ‘mess it all
up’. In this respect I highly recommend
a (re-) reading of Stern’s account of the expansive, and at the same time
limiting, effect of the emergence of language in the child’s development (in
‘Interpersonal world’, pp 170-182). As
Stern puts it, these basic processes (involved in vitality affects) are ‘all
non-verbal, analogic, dynamic gestalts that are not compatible with the
discontinuous, digital, categorical nature of words’.
It is only in the final chapter that Stern
turns his attention to the implications for psychotherapy with adults. He questions the place of language and
symbolization as the only, or even primary, creator of meaning, and explores
the idea of dynamic forms of vitality in relation to prosody (ie the ‘how’,
manner and process) of speaking, eg finding the ‘right’ words, the hit-and-miss
manner of telling, and how a focus on vitality forms can uncover the experience
of defenses well before the explicit conflict underlying the defenses is
uncovered.
Other fascinating explorations in this
chapter include vitality forms as paths to memory, reconstructing
phenomenological experience from subsequent verbal presentations, the place of imagined
movements in narrative forms of therapy, focusing on micro ‘local’ level events
in therapy as opposed to a larger psychodynamic forces/ meanings, vitality
forms and intersubjectivity, the role of vitality forms in internalization and
identification, and the development of aliveness and authenticity.
Stern himself acknowledges that most
experienced psychotherapists recognize the significance of movement and
non-verbal communication, and attend to the sorts of implications listed above,
particularly movement and body based, and phenomenologically oriented (eg Gestalt)
approaches. He himself stresses that his
book represents primarily an attempt to identify, conceptualize and give a name
to such experiences, in order to better
understand and use them, and thus whilst this final chapter is brief and
suggestive it is nevertheless an interesting attempt to do just that.
This (final?) book of Stern’s, perhaps more
than in any of his earlier work, exemplifies his breadth and depth of vision
and his ability to bridge such diverse worlds - infant development research,
neuroscience, and the performing arts – and all in the service of a more
embracing, integrated and creative practice of psychotherapy. Thanks Dan!
Selected
bibliography
·
The First Relationship: Infant and Mother (1977)
·
Diary of a Baby (1990)
·
Motherhood Constellation: A Unified View of Parent-Infant
Psychotherapy (1995)
·
The Birth of a Mother (1997)
·
The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life (2004).
·
Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy and Development
(2010)
Jim
Davis (TSTA) has a psychotherapy and supervision practice in Manchester. He also runs CTA trainee, CPD and PTSTA
training programmes – see www.psycheinstitute.com.
