The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology) by Daniel N. Stern

Author:Daniel N. Stern [Stern, Daniel N.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2010-05-17T04:00:00+00:00

The nature and enlarged scope of implicit knowing has several implications for the clinic. One of the more inclusive concepts used in traditional psychoanalytic treatment is that of resistance. A simple and broad definition of resistance comes from Laplanche and Pontalis: “the name ‘resistance’ is given to everything in the words and actions of the analysis and that obstructs his gaining access to his unconscious” (1967 / 1988, p. 394). Unconscious, here, refers to the repressed dynamic unconscious. In Freud’s thinking, repression and resistance were essentially the same in that they both obstructed the dynamic unconscious from gaining consciousness. According to Laplanche and Pontalis, Freud came to see resistance as a broader concept, as can be seen in his description of five different kinds of resistance: repression, transference resistance, resistance because of secondary gain (all of these are ego defenses), resistance from the super-ego stemming from unconscious guilt and the need for punishment, and resistance stemming from the id in the form of the repetition compulsion.

The problem now facing us is that implicit knowing is not dynamically unconscious and is thus not withheld from consciousness by resistances (repression). It is not conscious for other reasons I have mentioned. The concept of resistance does not apply to implicit knowing. This limitation takes on even greater importance when we consider the enormous scope of implicit knowing in both in everyday life and in psychotherapy. Implicit regulatory memories and representations play a constant role in shaping the transference and the therapeutic relationship, in general, as well as in making up much of our lived past and symptomatic present.

It appears that the majority of descriptively unconscious material does not need the concept of resistance, which must now be confined only to situations where repressed dynamic unconscious material is involved. Enactments, which are receiving much needed attention, fall into a gray zone between dynamically unconscious and implicitly nonconscious.

Can Freud’s early typology of resistances be of help in understanding the difficulties in going from the implicit to the explicit? The issue of violating some kind of wholeness and purity comes up. Recall the Alessandro Baricco quote in Chapter 7 that described the pure state of an unverbalized idea as a “beautiful mess,” an implicit knowing. This is commented on in Stern’s (1985) description of the language-learning child whose comfortable, rich, implicit, pre-verbal world is fractured into unrecognizable pieces by attaching language to his implicit experiences. In the Diary of a Baby (Stern, 1990, p. 122), a fictional 9-month-old infant plays in a patch of sunshine falling on the wooden floor. It makes a rich, multimodal sensory-feeling world for him. He tries to lick the sunshine on the floor. His mother stops him abruptly and says, “That’s just sunshine, honey. It’s just to look at. It’s only light on the floor. You can’t eat this sunshine. It’s dirty.”

If the fictional child could have understood her words he would have thought something like: “Each of her words is a muffled blow that cracks my space into pieces. ‘Just sunshine’—but it was my pool, a special pool! ‘It’s just to look at’—I heard it.

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