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Donnel B. Stern 61/2

RELATIONAL FREEDOM AND

THERAPEUTIC ACTION

Therapeutic action depends on our freedom to allow ourselves novel,

unbidden experience. How does this novelty arise? What is the process
by which some portion of the possibilities inherent in any moment’s
unformulated experience are created or selected and emerge in con-
sciousness? And what does it mean to think of freedom in this context?
What does it mean for the formulation of experience to be free? In the
frame of reference adopted here, the formulation of experience depends
on the conscious and unconscious events of the interpersonal field. The
field facilitates some formulations of experience and prevents others.
Thus, whatever we can do to make it possible for the analytic relation-
ship to evolve freely, without constraint or constriction, is the best way
we have to encourage the freedom to experience. “Relational freedom”
underpins therapeutic action. A clinical case is described at length to
illustrate these ideas.

N ovel conscious experience is unbidden (Stern 1990). It arrives in

our minds and bodies without an accompanying consciousness of
effort or memory of process; the means by which we create it are not
available to our inspection. We do not have access to what we would need
in order to construct a phenomenological account of the genesis of the
experience we create.
There is a strangeness about the unbiddenness of novel experience,
and about the hidden unfolding of its process, a strangeness we seldom
notice. We have so little sensuous or even cognitive contact with what
takes place in our minds to create novelty that it is in some ways as if it
belonged to someone else. When experience is unbidden, we are unfamil-
iar to ourselves; our minds and bodies are not simply our own, at least if
possessing ourselves means knowing what we possess. In itself, this fact

Faculty and Training and Supervising Analyst, William Alanson White Institute;
Adjunct Clinical Professor and Supervisor, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psycho-
therapy and Psychoanalysis.
Submitted for publication June 24, 2012.

DOI: 10.1177/0003065113484060 227

 Donnel B. Stern

is strange; yet what is perhaps even stranger is that it seldom registers. In

order to be aware of how unfamiliar we are to ourselves, it is usually
necessary to pay explicit, conscious attention to how little we have to do
with selecting and shaping the conscious contents of our minds. We must
remind ourselves, actively and with conscious purpose, that those con-
tents generally appear spontaneously and suddenly, out of what feels like
nowhere. Experience is just there. Despite the fact, though, that we must
agree that we have no prior acquaintance with much of what we find in
our minds and feel in our bodies, we do not feel most of this novel expe-
rience as alien or “other” to us, nor does the ongoing process of creating,
observing, and containing such experience have an alienating impact.
Quite the contrary. The process feels natural, and its products, in the very
moments of their arrival, feel as if they belong to us, as if they are part of
us. They do not feel as unfamiliar as, in fact, they are. If anything, and
oddly, or at least contrarily, they usually feel familiar. The whole process
seems utterly unremarkable. Unbidden, novel experience is like the air
we breathe: it is outside us or beyond us, but, at the same time, it is com-
pletely of a piece with living.

THE FREEDOM TO EXPERIENCE

What I am describing is the freedom to experience, the freedom to use our

minds. But when we are free in this way, we never know what our minds
will do; and so perhaps it would be better not to describe the freedom to
experience as the freedom to use our minds, but as the willingness to
allow our minds their freedom.
The unbidden expresses us, it manifests us. It realizes or actualizes
us. It gives emotionally and cognitively tangible form to what we are. For
my purposes, then, the unbidden lies at the heart of therapeutic action, at
once both the core of the process of change and the index we consult to
assess it.
Unbidden experience is not arcane. It is not a rare event, and it is not
necessarily powerful or dramatically enlightening (although the clinical
example I will offer later on happens to be both). Unbidden experience
appears routinely. In this sense, creativity is rampant in our lives. It hap-
pens in the office all day long, to therapists just as often as to patients. A
patient looks up at me and I have the sudden perception that she is quite
sad: that is an unbidden experience. Or a tone in her voice alerts me to a
note of regret that I have missed until then: that is an unbidden experi-

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ence. A flash of her eye awakens my awareness of her irritation at me:

unbidden again. Something she says makes me understand that her worry
that I will think she is self-indulgent is her mother talking: once again,
unbidden. None of these things comes about because I try or decide in
any consciously purposeful way to have the experience, and all these
thoughts are novel. They just happen. As a matter of fact, you can see that
unbidden experience is more the rule than the exception, the result of
what, twenty-some years ago, I called the process of courting surprise
(Stern 1990). The freedom to experience is a deeper-than-conscious will-
ingness to let go and allow the unbidden to come into being.

THE INTERPERSONAL FIELD

I may have made it sound as if I believe that this kind of experiencing

goes on in the confines of one person’s subjectivity, as if all this sponta-
neous unfolding comes about like a spring bubbling up out of the earth.
But that metaphor is terribly incomplete. Let me explain.
What I have just described as the freedom to experience is the pro-
cess by which unformulated experience is articulated or formulated
(Stern 1997, 2010). I have not yet made the crucial point that, even when
the process of formulation unfolds without inhibition, disruption, or
detour, its course is charted in the same moment that it takes place, and
its final shape therefore comes into being only as it arrives in our minds.
Until that moment, what will become formulated experience is only pos-
sibility. Experience, that is, does not preexist its formulation; it is not
predetermined, but emergent; it is not the revelation of something that is
already “there” in the mind, but a process, an activity.1 In fact, if we were
to insist on precise expression, we would refer not to experience but
to experiencing. We can never be certain of what our next experience
will be.
What, then, determines which possibility, among the several or many
that constitute any moment’s “wiggle room,” will come into being in the
unbidden formulations of any given moment?

1
 
Making this point always requires adding a proviso. It is not as if the mind is
empty of content until the process of formulation creates it. But the content that
preexists formulation remains to be given an explicit shape, and can take on any one
of a number of such shapes that exist within the constraints that limit the valid
possibilities for articulation in any particular instance. Regarding reality and its
constraints, see the text, just below.

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 Donnel B. Stern

Reality does constrain the possibilities. If we claim validity for expe-

rience, we are not free to articulate the unformulated in any way we
please. We create the articulated meanings that arrive unbidden in our
minds from among the potential meanings offered by unformulated expe-
rience; and all of this meaning-making generally goes on outside aware-
ness. Ideally, the resulting unbidden experience fits the purposes that
animated it in the first place, while simultaneously respecting reality’s
constraints.
How should we think about these purposes—the ones that select
formulation from the unformulated possibilities offered by reality, the
ones that animate the unbidden? Here we reach the interpersonal, rela-
tional, or intersubjective dimension of the experience. My position has
always been that the experience that can be formulated within the ana-
lytic dyad is a function of the nature of the relatedness between the two
participants (Stern 1983, 1997, 2010). The possibilities for the changing
contents of consciousness, in other words, are determined by the equally
mercurial nature of the interpersonal field, a concept that Harry Stack
Sullivan began to formulate in the 1920s (Sullivan 1940, 1953; Murphy
and Cattell 1952) and that was then developed in an explicitly psycho-
analytic direction by many others (e.g., Wolstein 1959, 1964; Levenson
1972, 1983, 1991; Stern 1997, 2010; Bromberg 1998, 2006, 2011; Ehren-
berg 1992; Fiscalini 2004).2 Stephen Mitchell’s “relational matrix”
(1988) and Jay Greenberg’s “interactive matrix” (1995) belong to the
same theoretical tradition.

2
 
If we do not restrict attention to the formulations of the interpersonal school,
many other writers could be added to this list, notably relational analysts (e.g., Aron,
Benjamin, Davies, Hoffman, Ogden), a number of whom are also identified with
interpersonal psychoanalysis and are therefore not cited here but in the text. Other
contributors are object relations theorists and other Middle School writers (Fairbairn,
Winnicott, Guntrip, Balint, and so on); self psychologists and intersubjectivists
(Stolorow, Lachmann, and their colleagues); students of development (Beatrice
Beebe; Daniel Stern, including the work of the Boston Change Process Study Group);
and neo-Kleinians and Bionians (see footnote 4). Contributors to field thinking also
include Freudian writers such as James McLaughlin and Hans Loewald. The signifi-
cance of Loewald’s work in this regard is not often recognized, but note Mitchell’s
observation (2000): “Perhaps the central feature of Loewald’s revisions of Freudian
theory is his shifting the locus of experience, the point of origination, from the indi-
vidual to the field within which the individual comes into consciousness. . . . In the
beginning, Loewald says over and over again, is not the impulse: in the beginning is
the field in which all individuals are embedded” (p. 35).

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The field is a jointly created configuration of relatedness, a social

medium that is the result of the conscious and unconscious involvement
and intersection of two subjectivities.3 The participants in the field may
or may not be aware of the field’s influence on them, depending at least
partly on the consequences that would ensue from that awareness. The
field is more like what is referred to by concepts of the analytic or inter-
subjective third (see the conceptions of Ogden [1994] and Benjamin
[2004], which overlap but are distinctly different), or what Gerson (2004)
calls the relational unconscious, than a mere context or surround. We
might say that the field is that configuration of influences that continu-
ously gives clinical process its particular, changing shape and nature.
The fact that the field links two subjectivities, however, does
not mean that it is a simple additive combination of influences. Instead
it is a unique creation, a new and ceaselessly changing gestalt that
expresses and represents the present, shifting states of relatedness
between patient and analyst. The field is not synonymous with transfer-
ence-countertransference. If the idea of transference-countertransference
remains meaningful (if, that is, it has not become so diluted that it refers
to the entire analytic relationship), it must refer to patterns of relatedness
modeled on the nature of experience with significant people from the
past. The interpersonal field is broader than that. It includes the influ-
ences on each participant of the entire nexus of affects, motives and
intentions, thoughts, proto-thoughts, meaningful behaviors, metaphors,
and fantasies that come into being when two people are involved with
one another.4

3 
By specifying both conscious and unconscious involvement, I mean to empha-
size that the interpersonal field should not be understood to exclude object relations.
This point has often been misunderstood, and as a consequence the interpersonal field
has been mischaracterized in sociological terms. In interpersonal psychoanalysis,
social phenomena and the unconscious mind have always been understood to be
reciprocal and interpenetrating. Neither is meaningful without the other, and each is
the context in which the other gains its significance. Interpersonal relations are simul-
taneously provocations or reasons for internal, individual, unconscious events and
reflections of those same events. See, for instance, Sullivan 1940, 1953; Levenson
1972, 1983, 1991; Bromberg 1998, 2006, 2011.
4
 
The conception of the field described in this paragraph is influenced not only
by interpersonal and relational writers, but also by neo-Kleinian and Bionian theorists
of the field (Baranger and Baranger 2009; Chianese 1997; Civitarese 2008, 2012;
Ferro 2009; Ferro and Basile 2009; Brown 2011). Racker (1968) might also be
included in this group. This is not the place to compare the understandings of the field
held by interpersonal/relational and neo-Kleinian/Bionian analysts. Two recent
papers (Stern in press a,b) take up those comparisons.

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 Donnel B. Stern

Freedom in the interpersonal field is defined by the degree of latitude

patient and analyst have to relate to one another without the kinds of
constraints introduced by unconscious defensive purposes. In the lan-
guage of relational dissociation theory, the most potent and limiting of
these constraints appear in the field as enactments, jointly constructed by
patient and analyst. These enactments are defensive operations that pre-
vent the eruption of dissociated “not-me” experience into the conscious-
ness of at least one member of the pair, thereby protecting the stability of
the self, or identity. That is, the exclusion of not-me from awareness
preserves one’s sense of who one is (Bromberg 1998, 2006, 2011; Stern
2004, 2010) by restricting what parts of subjectivity can become known,
formulated, unbidden experience.5 Enactments are the attribution of
one’s dissociated parts to the other, whom one then treats as the alien,
dissociated part of oneself.6 Enactment can therefore be described as “the
interpersonalization of dissociation” (Stern 2004, 2010), a rigidity in the
field, an impasse or “deadlock” (Stern 2003), a single-mindedness that
allows no alternatives. In the Barangers’ neo-Kleinian theory of the “bi-
personal psychotherapeutic relationship” (Baranger and Baranger 1969)7
or in their later, more felicitous term, “intersubjective field” (W. Baranger
1979), similar jointly constructed constraints or frozen parts of the field
are referred to as “bastions” or “bulwarks” (depending on the translator).
Ferro (2006) describes bulwarks as “nuclei of resistance” or “the couple’s
blind spots” (p. 998). In both the dissociation model and Bionian field
theory, rigidities in the field lead to stereotyped interactions that can be
destructive constraints on the freedom to create the future8; from both
perspectives, the more relaxed the field is, the more the minds of both
participants are free to create unbidden experience.

5 
For a related but different relational view of dissociation and enactment, see
Davies 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2004.
6 
There is a significant degree of overlap here with the concept of projective
identification, at least when projective identification is used defensively. But there are
differences, too. For a comparison, see Stern 2010, pp. 17–18.
7 
The Barangers’ work has recently drawn renewed international attention. Their
most influential paper was first published in Spanish in 1961–1962, and then revised
in 1969. This revised version was published in English for the first time in 2008, and
a volume of their papers was published in English in 2009.
8 
But it is also true that, precisely because enactments (and bastions and nuclei
of resistance) inhibit the free unfolding of the future, their resolution is one of the
most important influences liberating the future to unfold more freely than the past
did. This point is made explicitly in both literatures (see, e.g., Stern 2004; Ferro
2006).

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How the field is composed in any particular moment encourages

some unbidden articulations of experience and discourages others (Stern
1997, 2010). In turn, we can say that the composition of the field is cre-
ated by the interaction of the self-states of its participants, and is there-
fore in continuous flux. As self-states shift in the mind of each partici-
pant, as they routinely do, in responsive reciprocity with the self-states of
the other participant (see, e.g., Bromberg 1998, 2006, 2011), the field
changes.
But the interpersonal field remains a concept, not an experience. In
more experience-near terms, changes in the field are changes in the pos-
sibilities for relatedness—i.e., changes in the kinds of relatedness that are
facilitated or inhibited. We rarely “know” the field. For the most part, it
comes to our attention only through what we sense or feel of its influence.
To explicitly reflect on the field usually requires a conscious effort, one
that few people besides psychotherapists, with their professional inter-
ests, have a reason to expend; and there are many circumstances, or
aspects, of the field that do not allow even the possibility of such reflec-
tion. On the phenomenological level, as the nature of the field shifts,
generally without attracting our conscious attention, different kinds of
relatedness feel most obvious or natural to the participants. Patient and
analyst fall most easily into, and out of, certain relational patterns. These
events are unnoticed, unremarkable—in a word, “natural.” As one kind
of relatedness becomes natural (say, to take a simple example, friendli-
ness), other kinds of relatedness (say, irritability) fall into the background
and feel less comfortable, easy, or natural to create in this environment,
or are even actively avoided, sometimes with unconscious defensive
purpose.
From this perspective follow two further points: First, if we take seri-
ously the facilitating and inhibiting influences of the field on the contents
of individual minds, we must also take the position that the freedom to
allow the greatest range of unbidden experience rests on the degree of
flexibility and freedom of the field. Second, the degree of the field’s flex-
ibility is defined by the range of relatedness available to the participants.
We can summarize these points in terms that express what I am trying to
say in this article: the freedom to experience—that is, our access to the
widest range of unbidden experience—rests on what we might call rela-
tional freedom, a topic to which I will turn momentarily.
And so my answer to the question of why the metaphor of the spring
bubbling up from the earth is incomplete is that this metaphor might give

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the impression that the “ground” from which the “spring” emerges is
solid and unmoving. But I am taking the position that unbidden experi-
ence emerges from the possibilities allowed and prohibited by the inter-
personal field, which is in constant flux. And so, while each person’s
unbidden experience can indeed be conceived as a continuous stream, as
William James (1890) may have been the first to note, what the stream
grows from is something much more complex than the earth. It is hard
even to imagine the kind of mobile geometry that might represent the
process, although the emergent processes of nonlinear dynamic systems
offer interesting possibilities.
Let me review what I have said to this point. Therapeutic action
depends on our freedom to allow ourselves novel, unbidden experience.
But the particular novel formulation that appears in our mind is just one
of the possibilities that can be created from any moment’s unformulated
experience. We therefore need to conceptualize the process by which that
particular formulation becomes the one that arrives in consciousness.
That process, I have claimed, depends on the conscious and unconscious
events of the interpersonal field. Therapeutic action has to do with the
creation and emergence of unbidden formulations of experience from the
nexus of influences that is the interpersonal field.
Now let me add the third and final piece of the puzzle, and, for my
purposes in this essay, the most significant part of what I want to say.

R E L AT I O N A L F R E E D O M

If the interpersonal field is the gateway into consciousness, facilitating

some formulations of experience while preventing others, then whatever
it is that allows the most freedom in the field is also what will allow each
participant in the relationship to best take advantage of whatever personal
freedom he or she brings to the encounter—or creates there. We can
therefore conclude that whatever we can do to make it possible for the
analytic relationship to evolve freely, without constraint, inhibition, or
constriction, is the best way we have to encourage the freedom to experi-
ence. Relational freedom makes the freedom to experience possible, and
therefore underpins therapeutic action.
In practice, of course, psychoanalysts also think about this idea the
other way around: that is, we think of new understanding as the means by
which we accomplish new relational effects. In fact, this is the more tra-
ditional conception: increased understanding dissolves the rigidities of

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the transference-countertransference and in that way becomes the source

of greater relational freedom.
The truth is that all psychoanalysts approach the problems of thera-
peutic goals and therapeutic action from both of these directions. It would
be impossible not to. Sometimes we work toward greater freedom to
experience, hoping that such an outcome will free relatedness; at other
times, we work toward a greater freedom in relation to the other, hoping
that this outcome will free our capacity for unbidden experience. To the
extent that our various theoretical commitments differ on this point, the
differences are not absolute; they are, rather, differences of emphasis. In
the interpersonal/relational perspective, the emphasis falls on the muta-
tive effects of freeing clinical relatedness, while more traditional
approaches tend to conceptualize the interpretive understanding of trans-
ference. My emphasis here on the creation of relational freedom rather
than on the conventional pursuit of interpretive understanding should not
obscure the recognition that analysts of all persuasions work and think in
both ways.
And so my primary interest falls on this question: How can we
encourage relational freedom? The dilemma here is that to answer the
question of what is transpiring in the interpersonal field at any particular
time, one would need to know precisely what one does not and cannot
know in that moment. Our reflective grasp of relatedness is always at
least one step behind the relatedness itself. That is doubly true for any
problematic aspects of the relatedness, the parts that represent patterns of
unconscious involvement between analyst and patient. That is, what one
would need to formulate, if one were to be able to observe whatever is
problematic and having a constricting effect on the therapeutic related-
ness, is always unformulated, and therefore invisible, until the moment in
which it resolves—until the very growth in question has become possi-
ble. And by that time, the reason the solution is visible is that it has
already taken place.
I have written elsewhere (Stern 2004, 2009a, 2010; see also Brom-
berg [1998, 2006, 2011], who is the source of this idea) that enactments
resolve not through insight but via new perceptions of the other and one-
self, new perceptions that come about unpredictably. The best one can do
to influence problematic aspects of relatedness is to be sensitive to the
kinds of affective “snags” and “chafings,” ranging from vaguely uncom-
fortable to actively unpleasant, that signal the presence of dissociated

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enactments (Stern 2004). One stops and attends to such experiences, ask-
ing oneself what can be learned about what lies behind them.
Enactments are a subcategory of the broader class of field rigidities
that inhibit the freedom to experience. Enactments, that is, are extreme
examples of these inhibitions; but in any analyst’s daily work there are
many, many other, milder constrictions in the field, and they need to be
relaxed, too. Since dissociative enactments are one kind of field constric-
tion, we can use what we know about them to think more broadly about
encouraging relational freedom.
Our goal in relaxing milder constrictions of the field is the same in
kind as our goal in working with dissociative enactment: we want to do
whatever is possible to become aware of, and then loosen, constricted
interaction, thereby promoting therapeutic action by unlocking the capac-
ity of relatedness to serve as the crucible for the unbidden. But because
these events—this relaxation of relatedness—embody an emergent qual-
ity of the relatedness itself, it is impossible to specify in advance a tech-
nique to accomplish it. Events arise from within the analytic relationship
in a way that simply cannot be predicted. And so we can almost never
describe exactly what needs to be done to expand relational freedom.
Such episodes can be encouraged by our openness to the unexpected (an
openness that is always and necessarily only partial), but only that much
is possible. There can be no prescriptive theory of technique (see Tublin
2011). We do our best to court surprise. We attend to affective snags and
chafing, and we allow ourselves to feel the clinical relatedness so deeply
that its subtle possibilities for growth affect us in ways we do not neces-
sarily even formulate in so many words. Our affective involvement and
thoughtful study of our own experience is all we can contribute.
Sometimes the process of expanding relational freedom takes place
as the result of interpretation; but more often in my experience—in the
illustration I am about to offer, yes, but also in most instances in my work
in which relational freedom has expanded—the change is better described
as a relational effect, a kind of groping, by one or both participants in the
treatment, toward affectively charged meaning, meaning that may or may
not eventually be expressed in words. It often appears that verbal inter-
pretation is the source of therapeutic action, because when new under-
standings do come about verbally, the words are often surprising, grip-
ping, powerful. And sometimes verbal interpretation is mutative, of
course, as I have already made a point of saying. But I believe that, usu-
ally, the key event has already taken place by the time a new verbal

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understanding appears, even when the verbal understanding in question

is unbidden. The key event that so often precedes verbal understanding is
the appearance of new relational freedom. It is this relational freedom, a
loosening or relaxing of the interpersonal field, that creates the possibility
of new experience, including new verbal understanding, that each mem-
ber of the relationship can have in the other’s presence (Stern 2009a,
2010). As relational freedom expands, the field changes and new, unbid-
den meanings appear spontaneously, the way water rushes in to fill an
empty space.
The new experiences that patient and analyst can have in one anoth-
er’s presence when relational freedom expands are not limited to experi-
ences that correspond to, or represent, this new interpersonal opening. The
unbidden experience that opens from new relational freedom, in other
words, is not limited to the aspects of transference-countertransference
that composed the previous constriction. The novel experience that
becomes explicitly available may be fantasy or memory not obviously
related to the new relational freedom; or it may be some kind of insight
about other, seemingly irrelevant matters, such as the sudden appearance
in the mind of one of the partners of an understanding of some aspect of
his own or the other’s character; the novel experience may even be (as in
the clinical illustration to which I will turn in a moment) a new observa-
tion or grasp of some part of the patient’s history or current life outside
the treatment. The relaxation of a constriction in the field, we can say,
“unlocks” the potential in certain other experiences that, while they must
be in some way connected to the constriction, are not necessarily linked
to it in ways that are immediately obvious.
In general, as the possibilities of relatedness expand, we become
more and more able to allow our minds their full measure of creative
invention and expression; we tolerate and even enjoy thinking and feeling
with relative freedom, even when that freedom brings a certain amount of
discomfort. The greater the degree of relational freedom, the less the
interaction is guided or interrupted by the kinds of derailments, distor-
tions, or distractions that occur when unconscious defensive needs, in
order to manage affective discomfort, force relatedness into certain
themes, or down certain pathways. Instead we create a relatively welcom-
ing attitude toward our own capacity to feel, think, and innovate, allowing
our conscious experience to shape itself in whatever way best serves our
deepest nondefensive intentions at the moment. By “deepest nondefen-
sive intentions,” an ambiguous phrase at best, I mean intentions that are

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integrative or synthetic, and sometimes articulating or differentiating. I

mean the constructive, what Freud meant by Eros.
I do not mean to suggest, though, that relational freedom is a con-
crete goal, as if it were a position that is possible to reach. I mean instead
to present clinical relatedness as a continuous amalgam, or dialectic, of
freedom and constriction, so that our work is organized by the ongoing
challenge to identify constriction and create freedom. Each change in the
field, including each successful creation of new relational freedom, leads
to new possibilities for both freedom and constriction. The challenge of
creating relational freedom lasts as long as the treatment endures.
How does the idea of relational freedom relate to the traditional
way of representing freedom in discussions of technique, namely, the
patient’s free association (Freud 1913) and the analyst’s evenly hovering
attention?
Free association and evenly hovering attention are matters of indi-
vidual intention and decision. Analyst and patient quite knowingly, and
separately, take on these attitudes, functions, and ways of conduct. Bollas
(2001) calls them “the Freudian pair” (p. 93). Of course, neither free
association nor evenly hovering attention can be adopted in any absolute
sense. Each is always compromised by unconscious factors—analyst and
patient can do no more than try to fulfill the intentions described by these
terms. Nevertheless, even in the presence of these compromises, free
association and evenly hovering attention are understood to be con-
sciously chosen. In this frame of reference, even if analyst and patient
must maintain the greatest respect for the encroachments of the uncon-
scious, some part of freedom can be made to happen.
Relational freedom, on the other hand, is not a set of intentions, but
a welcome but unpredictable outcome, and so it cannot be adopted or
“taken on” by choice at all, either separately or jointly. When it comes
about, it occurs as a joint, nonconscious creation of analyst and patient.
Relational freedom, like (say) Benjamin’s “intersubjectivity” (1999,
2004), is a mutually created attribute of the analytic relatedness that,
while it can be hoped for, cannot be intentionally selected or chosen, by
either participant, in any meaningful sense. It must instead grow sponta-
neously from activities the analytic pair engage in at least partly in the
hope of provoking it. Unconscious encroachment has the same degree of
salience it has in the classical view, but in the relational scheme the loca-
tion of its primary influence has shifted from the single mind to the dyad:
the unconscious of both the patient and the analyst, both the unconscious

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that encroaches and the one that expands creatively into new experience
and expresses itself in a joint creation—the field. And so we cannot say
that relational freedom is chosen in any sense at all; we must say instead
that it emerges. In relational terms, no part of freedom can be made to
happen.9
There are myriad discussions of the subject of freedom in the psy-
choanalytic literature, but given constraints of space, which I am already
stretching, I must be content for the time being to examine only the ques-
tions I have raised about free association and evenly hovering attention.
I particularly regret not being able to carry out a comparison between my
views and those presented by Symington (1983) in his classic article on
the analyst’s “act of freedom” as agent of therapeutic change.
One last point before going on to my clinical illustration, a point I
cannot overemphasize: relational freedom is created and reflected as
much in the analyst’s experience as in the patient’s. From a relational
psychoanalytic perspective it is axiomatic that patient and analyst are
each routinely and continuously involved with one another, both con-
sciously and unconsciously.

C L I N I C A L I L L U S T R AT I O N

When he started treatment, my patient William was a talented and suc-

cessful fifty-year-old corporate lawyer who had married for the first time
just a few years earlier, and now had three young daughters. He felt lucky
to have met his wife, Jan. He felt close and intimate with her, and he was
wildly in love with his children. He had always wanted a family of his
own but had worried, as he got older, that he would never have one. Ear-
lier in his career he had worked for a large law firm in Manhattan, and he
had worked the usual horrendous hours demanded by such jobs. He had

9
Although a discussion of Hoffman’s relational critique of free association and
 

evenly hovering attention (2006) would take me too far afield here, I subscribe to his
argument that accepting free association and evenly hovering attention as the basic
functions of our work implies the denial of three things: the patient’s agency, the
patient’s and the analyst’s interpersonal influence, and the patient’s share of
responsibility for co-constructing the analytic relationship. In fact, one might say that
the concept of relational freedom is one way to imagine living in a psychoanalytic
world in which these denials do not exist, and in which, therefore, free association
and evenly hovering attention are not the key concepts that they remain for most
analysts today.

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 Donnel B. Stern

enough anxiety about romantic relationships in those days to have used

the excuse provided by his work hours to avoid an active social life with
women and had instead spent most of his few free evenings either alone
at home or watching sports with men friends at bars. He met Jan, who
was fifteen years younger than he was, while collaborating on a case with
another firm, and it was then he began to feel willing, and eventually
eager, to confront his inhibitions. He felt for the first time that he just
could not bear to limit himself to professional success, and that perhaps
he really could have a family. After much soul-searching of this kind (and
before entering treatment), he managed to find a corporate job in a bou-
tique firm, small but wealthy. While affording him a lower income than
he had made as a partner in his previous firm, the new firm allowed him
enough time to develop his life with the woman who would eventually
become his wife. The relative freedom of his new job also allowed him
to pursue a four-times-a-week analysis, which Jan encouraged him
to begin, and that he himself came to feel he needed because of long-
standing anxieties (including, but not limited to, his previous avoidance
of romantic relationships) and a strong degree of self-criticism that at
times descended into agitated depression. He already took antidepres-
sants, but once he began his analysis he nurtured the hope that treatment
would eventually help him do without them.
William had grown up in the suburbs of New York City with his
parents and two sisters. The oldest of the three siblings, he had always
done well in school. From early in his life it was taken for granted, both
by others and by himself, that he would do well; and he did, all the way
along. He earned high grades and was popular, well-liked, and athletic.
During his second year of college, he had what he considered the
formative experience of his life, a terrible automobile accident. He suf-
fered broken bones, internal injuries, and disfigurement that required
extensive (and successful) plastic surgery. He had lost consciousness, and
it was not clear for some time after the accident how much brain damage
he had sustained and how well he would recover from it. It was not even
clear for a considerable period whether he would survive. Treatment went
on for months, during which time he had many surgeries and was often
in severe pain and in and out of critical condition. He spent much time in
the intensive care unit. Thin to begin with, he lost more weight. Eventu-
ally he spent time in a rehabilitation facility and recovered remarkably
well, both physically and cognitively, though he does have medical
sequelae to this day.

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But I am primarily concerned here with the psychological trauma.

William certainly recognized that he had been emotionally traumatized
by these terrible events, but he also knew that, despite trying to be open
to their impact on him, he had always maintained a certain distance from
them. The trauma of his accident and the awful aspects of his treatment
were important to him, and he often looked for the impact of these things
in other, later happenings in his life. As I said, he thought of the accident
as the single most important event of his life. But his explorations and
associations about it, at least when he expressed them to me, were never
as powerful as one might have thought they would be; and he was a little
melancholy about this inability to feel the depths of his trauma in the
relatedness between him and those with whom he was close, including
me. As important as this piece of his life was, he just could not feel it as
deeply as he longed to, or share it with the fullness he could sometimes
imagine but could not create. He had a sense of loss about this. It was not
until after the session I will recount that either he or I really formulated
the fact that, despite the presence of caring people around him, he had
always lacked a witness for these experiences; but in retrospect, after that
session, we agreed that on an implicit level he had always missed having
the sense that someone was there, during those events, who really
grasped how he felt about what had happened to him. That is where we
were at the time of the incident I am going to describe.
One of the sources of William’s self-criticism was his sense that,
despite backing off his professional commitments to the degree he had,
he was still too involved in his work life, and that his family suffered as
a result. He had made a lot of money as a partner in his previous firm, and
so he did not really need the income he made now. But he had not felt
ready to give up a work life yet, and as long as he did continue working,
his self-regard required him to do it responsibly. And so he was well
aware that he had made choices that kept him from being with his family
as much as he could have been had that been his only priority. He some-
times felt, guiltily, that his family should be his sole consideration. But
his worries went further: he could become quite upset, even frightened,
that his willingness to spend time working, away from them, would alien-
ate his wife and children; he worried he would cease being important to
them. And yet he was not willing to give up his work, either.
It may not surprise you to find out that, despite these worries, Wil-
liam is as involved a father as I have known. His relationship with his

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wife and children, though it has its difficulties (I will detail those in a
moment) is warm and intimate.
And so William’s worry about becoming unimportant to his family
was unnecessary, at least as far as reality was concerned. Jan did not
resent his work, though she was often impatient and sometimes quite
angry about William’s need for ceaseless reassurance of her love for him.
It was also obvious that William’s children felt proud of their father’s
success, secure in their attachment to him, and quite happy to see him off
to work in the morning. No, the problem was William’s self-criticism—
and the nature of his relatedness to his parents.
William worried that he would reproduce his parents’ narcissistic
relationship with him, in which a great deal of the interaction between
them and him was intended to demonstrate his parents’ love and generos-
ity. That would have been difficult enough for William; but the more
significant purpose of these expressions of affection and concern from
William’s parents was to harvest appreciation and gratitude, so that Wil-
liam’s father and mother could feel affirmed in their role as parents.
There were endless presents for the grandchildren, for instance, for which
not only the children, but also William and his wife, were expected to be
impressed and grateful. Never mind that the gifts were never matched to
what the children really wanted. The gifts and the children’s wants were
so poorly matched, in fact, that the children seemed to take it for granted
that the presents were nothing more than reasons that they needed to say
thank you. On one hand, William resented and battled the narcissism of
his parents, while on the other he unconsciously identified with this way
of being. As a result, in his relationship with his wife and children, Wil-
liam tried to avoid a narcissistic investment in his own life that would
compromise his relationship to them and, simultaneously and unwit-
tingly, sometimes put his wife and children in the same emotional posi-
tion his parents had put him—which is to say, a position in which Wil-
liam needed his wife and kids to appreciate him for his generosity and
goodness and felt frustrated and resentful if that response was not forth-
coming. When he saw all this clearly, especially his resentment, he felt
guilty and ashamed. William was quite authentically warm and generous,
while also angling for his family’s affirmation in ways he disapproved of
whenever he understood himself to be acting on these motives. He was
anxious when he worried about his selfishness, and he was resentful
when he felt his family withheld the affirmation he needed.

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The analytic relatedness, of course, was partly shaped around these

same themes. William worried that when he had to change the time of a
session or was late in arriving, I would resent him for his selfish preoc-
cupation with himself and his own needs. And he sometimes barely sup-
pressed his irritation with me when I behaved in a way he could tell had
something to do with my own needs and not only with his. It goes with-
out saying that I found myself being able to understand my own behavior,
at times, as the reciprocal role in these two kinds of interaction. William
and I had a good collaboration about these parts of what went on between
us; we noted and spoke about them frequently.
One day William arrived for his session in a state of extreme upset.
He had had a particularly bad time the evening before with his wife. It
was one of those times when he needed her reassurance, and when she
became, as she sometimes did at such moments, more and more irritated
and withholding. William was in and out of touch with what he was
doing, pressuring her in his subtle way, which he acknowledged could be
manipulative, playing on her guilt. He sympathized with the way his wife
felt; but he also needed the reassurance and felt angry that she would not
give it to him. He just couldn’t stop trying to elicit it, all the time feeling
more and more miserable, desperate, and alternately angry at her and
hating himself. His unhappiness was palpable, and I felt bad for him. I
am fond of William, and I felt keenly that, despite being able to under-
stand his wife’s feelings, there was a way in which he really couldn’t help
the way he behaved and felt.
As he was talking to me (he was on the couch), I was also having
another reaction, one fairly unusual for me. I was thinking that perhaps I
would have liked William to feel that he could call me during this awful
time the evening before. I guessed that he would not have felt comfort-
able doing that, for several reasons. He would have worried that he would
burden me, and he would have doubted the justification for interrupting
my evening. Under many circumstances, I might have agreed with him.
The people with whom I work seldom call me, and I only infre-
quently encourage them to do so. I usually do so only when I know they
are in a terrible reality that may collapse. I have often encouraged people
to call me after surgery or a crucial diagnosis, or asked them to allow me
to check in with them after such events; I have told people to feel free to
call if a friend or relative took a turn for the worse or died before I saw
them next, as has sometimes appeared likely; I have certainly told people
to call me if they were suicidal; and so on. But I cannot remember an

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occasion on which I have encouraged a patient to call me because he or

she felt unhappy, especially if the unhappiness had to do with a problem
with unconscious roots that was a focus of the treatment. That is what I
meant just above when I said that, under many circumstances, I might not
encourage a patient to call me. I want to be reliable and available, but I
don’t necessarily want to encourage the perception that contact with me
outside the session solves problems (see Balint [1969] on malignant
regression).
And so, as William talked to me, I mused about why I was having the
thought that maybe he should have called me. Why did this particular
incident call out this response in me? But I made no headway. The min-
utes ticked by. William talked to me, and I listened. I felt that my oppor-
tunity to speak my piece was draining away. Soon, I could sense, the
moment would be gone, and it would no longer be possible for me to tell
him that he should have called me. But what was I doing by saying this?
I couldn’t tell. Finally, the last moment came, the moment after which I
knew the opportunity would have passed.
I still felt like speaking, and so I did, without knowing exactly why,
but feeling that my impulse was, at the very least, not merely narcissistic.
I felt I was speaking up for William. I felt that saying something at this
moment was in William’s interest, though I could not really give a strong
argument to support that conclusion. I said simply, “Maybe you should
have called me.”
William was suddenly quiet. Although he is deeply emotional, he
does not cry easily. Actually, I think that until then he had never cried
with me at all. After a few moments of silence, a tear rolled down the side
of his face. I was deeply moved. He didn’t respond verbally, but it wasn’t
necessary. I felt content to sit quietly. The silence continued for a couple
of minutes. William then began to talk again, telling me about how the
previous evening had eventually ended in a kind of rapprochement with
his wife that had made him feel a little better.
Then he began to tell me about the next morning—that is, the morn-
ing of this same day, just a few hours before the session we were having
right then. William and his wife often took their children to school
together. That morning, the five of them came downstairs in their apart-
ment building together, and William’s wife and daughters continued out
the door and down the street, while William took care of some business
about a package with the doorman. When William finished and walked
out the door and onto the sidewalk, he saw his wife and daughters walking

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down the street, their backs to him, perhaps fifty yards ahead. He was
struck with a sudden, intense melancholy, seeing them together like that.
They seemed to be natural in one another’s company, and here he was,
alone and apart from them, looking at them walking away from him.
I felt William’s wistful sense of being left behind, and I found myself
thinking about the months after the auto accident all those years ago, and
about his surgeries and recuperation, first in the hospital and then at the
rehabilitation facility. For some reason, I imagined what it would have
been like for him at the end of each day, when friends and family would
leave him alone in his room. I imagined that as they left he was some-
times in pain and frightened about the future. I had no idea then, nor do
I now, why this was my association, but the thought was unbidden and
very clear. I had no idea if my thought bore any relation to his experience
all those years ago, but I did know that I wanted to tell him about it. I said,
“I don’t know exactly why, but when I think of you looking down the
street like that, after Jan and the kids, I think of you in the hospital after
the accident and what it could have felt like to you whenever your friends
and family left you there at the end of the day, when they went home for
the night. I thought that being left alone like that could have been pretty
terrible, especially when you didn’t really know whether you were going
to be okay, and that maybe that feeling is something that’s been missing
from our talking about that time in your life. Maybe being left behind
with that pain and fear was pretty awful.”
William responded by bursting into tears. He sobbed on and off for
the remainder of the session. We said very little about content, except to
agree on two things: William’s feelings of being left alone and behind
were indeed crucial, but had never before really been formulated in just
that way; and the episode that had taken place earlier in the session, when
I suggested that maybe William should have called me the night before,
had somehow made possible what happened later in the session. In this
case, the loosening between us seems to have begun with me and not with
him. I am not sure why that was, though I have some thoughts about it
that I will describe in a moment. Nor do I know, for that matter, whether,
if we followed the sequence backward in time, we might find some way
in which it appeared that it was not me but William who had initiated the
process. I suspect, actually, that trying to establish which participant sets
off such sequences is an exercise in futility. Sometimes it appears that one
participant initiates the sequence, sometimes it appears to be the other;

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but it is hard to imagine that the relation between the appearance of prior-
ity and its reality is anything other than complex and ambiguous.
In any case, when I told William that maybe he should have called
me the night before, something released or relaxed in me. Something in
me opened to him. I felt in that moment an unalloyed sense of wanting to
be there for William, uncomplicated by any reservation. I had felt the
depth of his need, and in that simple suggestion that maybe he should
have called me I had responded to that need with a depth that (I felt)
matched his own. I have mentioned that, despite the fact that William
frequently had company during the recuperation that followed the acci-
dent, he had not really had a witnessing presence during that terrible time
(see Stern 2009a,b, 2010, 2012). Something changed in that respect dur-
ing this session, and the change continued over time in William’s life,
both with me and with others. After this session he found himself able to
talk about his accident and his recuperation with his wife and close
friends in ways that previously he could not—and of course that differ-
ence in the way he could talk about it reflected a difference in the way he
experienced it. In finding our way to the possibility of knowing this part
of his experience together, William and I brought a new intensity and
depth of feeling to the way he occupied this part of his life.
These events between William and me are an example of what I
mean by an expansion of relational freedom. Perhaps now it is clear why
I have also said that such an expansion is not usually accomplished by
interpretation, and often not by any kind of verbal understanding at all.
Relational freedom is usually something we grope toward. It is some-
times the result of one person serving as witness for the other. The out-
come is that the way is opened to unbidden experience of other kinds, as
the way was opened for me, in this instance, to imagine something
entirely new and unbidden about William’s experience after his accident.
Note that, as I have already claimed, the new unbidden experience that
came about as a consequence of the relaxation of the clinical process
cannot be described (at least not without an effort of imagination—see
the paragraph that immediately follows this one) as the unbidden symbol-
ization of the transference-countertransference exchange most relevant to
the appearance of the new relational freedom. What came to light was
something else, something that no doubt bears some meaningful relation
to the relaxation of clinical process that provoked it, but that cannot be
reduced to its representation.

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But let me also acknowledge what might be the point of view of

those many analysts, probably the majority, for whom the concept of
interpretation is central to therapeutic action, and will remain so. I sus-
pect that most of these analysts, to the extent that they disagree with me,
do not differ so much over what I did with William, but rather over how
I understand what I did. They will perhaps argue that when I said,
“Maybe you should have called me,” my intervention can actually be
understood as an interpretation, or, as one commentator put it, at least as
“interpretation adjacent.” Their point, that is, might be that what I said
can be read to imply something about the nature of the transference-
countertransference, something perhaps like, “Maybe your history with
your parents, and the worries you can’t help having about my emotional
responsiveness as a result, leaves you in a position in which you don’t
turn to me for help, comfort, or reassurance as much as you might other-
wise want to do.”
But that kind of interpretive statement is not what I thought I was
doing in the moment. In fact, in order to understand what I did as an
interpretation, I had to feel my way into it on the basis of my imagination
of the perspective held by colleagues who hold views different from my
own. I also think there is something to be said for reserving the concept
of interpretation for interventions that are expressly interpretive in form
and intention—and mine was neither. In any case, I do want to acknowl-
edge the possibility of looking at what I did as an interpretation, because
I want to avoid the implication, which might be drawn mistakenly by
some readers if I don’t make this point explicit, that I think of interpreta-
tion in simplistic, caricatured terms, as if I believe it to be an intellectual-
ized, impersonal, emotionally removed form of intervention made “from
above” by the analyst.

C O N S T R I C T I O N , R E L A X AT I O N , A N D
R E L AT I O N A L F R E E D O M

To this point, I have addressed the expansion of relational freedom

between William and me primarily as a matter of growth. That, I believe,
is one good way to understand what took place: there is a perspective
from which it seems reasonable to say that freedom found its way, with-
out much controversy or conflict, into aspects of our relatedness in which
it had been absent.

247
 Donnel B. Stern

But these events can also be understood as the relaxation of constric-

tions in the relatedness between us. Before I end, I want to tell you some-
thing about the obstacles to relational freedom between William and
me—the nature of the constrictions that may have been inhibiting the
range of our relatedness, and what I think may have happened to relax
them.10
When patient and therapist first meet one another, they have not yet
created patterns of relatedness between them. That fact leads to a surpris-
ing possibility: patient and analyst may be more free to formulate certain
observations of one another at the inception of their relationship than
they will be once they have established a relational history between them.
That is not to say that a relational history is anything less than central to
the possibility of favorable treatment outcomes. We all know, whatever
the details of our particular theories, that the creation of patterns of relat-
edness, and then the use and description of these patterns, lies at the heart
of therapeutic action. But as patient and therapist get to know one another
and these patterns begin to be established, it becomes more and more
likely that the relatedness between the two people is structured in ways
that become habitual. The two participants establish mutually interlock-
ing ways of being; they “get used to” one another. These habitual patterns
of relatedness tend to be conservative; they preserve the status quo; they
are safe.
Some part of the atmosphere of safety in any treatment is authenti-
cally secure, of course—by which I mean that this part of the atmosphere
of safety rests on each partner’s well-earned confidence in the other’s
sensitivity and emotional responsiveness. (It goes without saying that the
patient’s sense of safety is more important than the analyst’s; but the
analyst’s confidence in the stability of the patient’s connection to him or
her is also important, and gets too little attention.) This authentic kind of
safety not only does not inhibit new experience, it facilitates it.
But the atmosphere of safety also has a dark side: it is defined partly
by patterns of relatedness that represent the mutually constructed avoid-
ance of aspects of relatedness that we unconsciously fear would be unac-
ceptably uncomfortable if we experienced them more openly or directly.
As these patterns are constructed over time, the range of the unbidden
experience that each participant can have in the presence of the other can

10
 
Samuel Gerson (1996, 2004) has explored a similar area of clinical work under
the rubric “intersubjective resistance.”

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 RELATIONAL FREEDOM AND THERAPEUTIC ACTION

actually become narrower. Unexpected moments become less frequent,

replaced by an often comforting sense of familiarity. Harry Stack Sulli-
van (1956) described selective inattention, the process that mediates this
kind of relatedness, as “so suave that we are not warned that we have not
heard the important thing in the story—that it has just been dropped out”
(p. 52), a description that conveys the feeling of naturalness that, for both
parties, eventually slips into the atmosphere in a way that inhibits new
experience and discourages surprise.
The constrictions of relatedness that are hidden by seamless patterns
of interaction—that is, the sources of discomfort that seamless patterns
of relatedness are unconsciously created to obscure—constitute knots
that must be relaxed if relational freedom is to expand. As I have said
throughout these remarks, successfully relaxing these constrictions, and
thereby shifting the parameters of the interpersonal field in a way that
frees the minds of both analyst and patient, is one of the most important
ways we have to open the analytic relationship to the wider and deeper
range of unbidden experience that is the hallmark of successful psycho-
analytic treatment.
In retrospect, I can speculate about the patterns of relatedness that
were functioning to constrict the experience that was possible between
William and me. Given what I have told you already, you can no doubt
imagine easily enough that William worried that his need of me would be
burdensome. I believe that he often did his best, from one moment to the
next, and without awareness, to give me the sense that he wanted or
needed very little from the relatedness between us. And yet, of course, he
did want something from me, something important, and he conveyed to
me that he did, though in ways that usually allowed him to keep from
himself the significance of what he was doing. I have already mentioned
that sometimes he was mildly annoyed with me when he sensed my own
interests, even if the evidence was as minor as my wish to share with him
a funny moment.
Looking back in time, it seems likely to me that, feeling William’s
worry about burdening me or being disappointed in me, I responded with
a certain caution, hoping (in a way I did not formulate) to avoid the out-
comes that would have let him down, annoyed him, or shamed him by
making him feel like a burden to me. This was all quite subtle, if I am
right to construct our history this way; and it resulted in a certain tight-
ness or awkwardness (though “awkwardness” feels like too strong a
word) around my nurture and concern for William. That tightness, in

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turn, would have made William feel just a bit tighter about these things
himself, resulting in a kind of subtly inhibited quality in the atmosphere.
The possibility of William’s shame was, I believe, ever present. All of
this (again, if I am right) was obscured by a seamless quality in our deal-
ings with one another, a quality that, by allowing us to keep these issues
blunted or dampened, protected both of us from direct exposure to our
subtle awkwardness with one another.
When I think back on it I feel that, for a few weeks prior to the epi-
sode I have recounted, I had a certain anticipatory awareness of all this,
a kind of orienting toward it, the way a flower turns to the sun. Without
having found any words to describe it, or even explicitly noticing it—and
certainly without having explicitly reflected on it—I was sensing certain
affective snags and chafings related to the tightness I have described. In
a less than conscious way, I was playing with these snags, noting them
and giving them increasingly free rein to gambol about in my mind. I
think I worked myself into a slightly different relation to these aspects of
our relationship, so that when I spoke to William about calling me on the
phone, I spoke from a state in which I was more relaxed about these
issues between us than I had been. I think the impact of my less inhibited
state registered on William. I think he might have felt, rightly, that when
I spoke I was just giving voice to a spontaneous thought. He could have
taken this impression from my tone of voice or my relaxed informality.
The very spontaneity of the remark, in fact, probably contributed to the
way it moved William. He could tell, I speculate, that what I said came
from my wish to comfort him and not from a technical prescription—
although it would be precisely my contention that the point here is that
these two kinds of response can be, and in this case were, indistinguish-
able. But of course, like me, William put none of these events or under-
standings into words prior to our later discussion of them.
As a consequence of this expansion of relational freedom and the
changes in the interpersonal field that fell into place as a result, we each
became spontaneously capable, in the presence of the other, of unbidden
experience we had not been capable of having before. I had the urge to
tell him he should have called me, and he could be moved by it; and then,
later on, I had the unbidden thought about his abandonment in the hospi-
tal; and again he could respond to it and allow himself the spontaneous
experience of being witnessed. William’s response to me was just as
much the result of a new relational freedom as my responses were: that

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is, the fact that I could offer William an experience of witnessing did not
necessarily mean that he would be able to accept it.
Or am I imagining this whole preparatory history? Maybe the epi-
sodes in that session happened pretty much the way they felt in the
moments in which they came together: all at once, without anything like
gradual development. Maybe events reached a tipping point and then just
toppled over into change, as we might characterize the events in the lan-
guage of nonlinear dynamic systems theory.
In either case, though, whether we are using a linear or a nonlinear
model of change, I am comfortable with the conclusion that all the events
I have described had to happen by themselves. They had to be unbidden.
William and I could not have made them happen, although it is certainly
fair to say that we wanted them to happen. Or at least he and I would
agree that we would have wanted them to happen, if, before their occur-
rence, we could have imagined them explicitly enough to make wanting
them possible. This was especially true of my part of the relatedness,
since I can’t imagine that I would have spoken as I did to William about
calling me without the hope, even if it was implicit, that what I said
would somehow be useful to him. Why else would anyone say such a
thing? I did not formulate what I am about to say in so many words; but
it seems to me, looking back at it, that I wanted to convey that I cared
about how William felt, and also that I wanted him to be able to feel
whatever he would feel in response to knowing this.
If someone had stopped me in that moment, asked me to spell out my
motive for wanting to tell William that maybe he should have called me,
and given me a few seconds to think, I suppose that I could have offered
some sort of coherent explanation. But I certainly wasn’t able to think
that clearly before I spoke. I couldn’t have, not in that moment, not the
way it unfolded. As I have said, even before we take account of our
unconscious involvement with our patients, which of course complicates
matters even further, our thoughts lag behind our conduct. Our capacity
for reflection is always at least a step behind our participation; and that
means that we psychotherapists often must make our decisions without
knowing exactly what we are doing. In such moments of choice, which
are so frequent that we cease even recognizing them, our experience is
not formulated and cannot be, at least not in time to serve as the basis for
our judgment about what to do next. We depend on our own analyses and
the rest of our training, and on our clinical experience, all of which are in
our bones. But in the end, even though our participation is educated, we

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are really just doing our best to find a response that is adequate to our
clinical and human purposes. We are feeling our way. We are courting
surprise. This particular moment with William did surprise me. And the
relatedness between us then opened in a way I could not have predicted.

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