The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life

Daniel N. Stern, M.D.

*Winner of the NAAP Gradiva Award for Best Book on Critical Analysis/ Psychoanalysis*

 

Praise for The Present Moment

"This work is a must-read for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists interested in psychotherapeutic process and a new and systematic way to think about the 'here and now,' which most therapists believe is at the center of where change in psychotherapy occurs. But Stern's latest work also has the power to show the eternity in a moment, to paraphrase poet William Blake. In doing so, this book will leave every reader with a new appreciation for the richness of even the most seemingly mundane moments in everyday life."

—American Journal of Psychiatry

"A major contribution to our understanding of psychological development and memory as well as a detailed exploration of the therapeutic process."

—Smith College Studies in Social Work

"[E]xtremely important… I am thankful for a book that conveys neew experiences and ideas about the human being in such a positive way."

—Counselling Psychology Quarterly

"Here is Daniel Stern's immensely important, indisputably major, new book on 'the present moent,' authoritatively straddling the spectrum encompassing psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, adult and child, neuroscience and phenomenological philosophy, and much else, a book which summates many years of preoccupation, and collaborative labor (much of it also involving the Boston Change Study Group), on his part, in a most lucid, concise, and comprehensive way. [...] It is one of those books whose unfolding implication--and invitation to dialogue and difference--is inexhaustible, and I am left with the frustration of the sense that anything less than a commentary and cross-connecting on the whole work will be a caricature."
—International Journal of Psychotherapy

“Psychiatrist Daniel N. Stern focuses on breakfast. Not on eating it, but on examining how his patients prepare their food, what they're thinking while they fix it and what they're feeling as they go through this morning ritual . . . [I]t's these brief moments of everyday life that Stern has spent years plumbing.”
—The Washington Post

“This work is a must-read for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists interested in psychotherapeutic process and a new and systematic way to think about the 'here and now,' which most therapists believe is at the center of where change in psychotherapy occurs. But Stern's latest work also has the power to show the eternity in a moment, to paraphrase poet William Blake. In doing so, this book will leave every reader with a new appreciation for the richness of even the most seemingly mundane moments in everyday life.”
—American Journal of Psychiatry

“[T]akes thinking about psychotherapy into the 21st century. . . . [P]rovides the best tools yet developed for manging and describing human experience . . . . Stern presents a powerful paradigm for understanding how change happens in psychotherapy that does for psychotherapy what the invention of the MRI . . . did for radiology.”

—The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease

 

Overview – Table of Contents – Chapter 1

While most psychotherapies agree that therapeutic work in the 'here and now' has the greatest power to bring about change, few if any books have ever addressed the problem of what 'here and now' actually means. Beginning with the claim that we are psychologically alive only in the now, internationally acclaimed child psychiatrist Daniel N. Stern tackles vexing yet fascinating questions such as: what is the nature of 'nowness'? How is 'now' experienced between two people? What do present moments have to do with therapeutic growth and change?

Certain moments of shared immediate experience, such as a knowing glance across a dinner table, are paradigmatic of what Stern shows to be the core of human experience, the 3 to 5 seconds he identifies as 'the present moment.' By placing the present moment at the center of psychotherapy, Stern alters our ideas about how therapeutic change occurs, and about what is significant in therapy. As much a meditation on the problems of memory and experience as it is a call to appreciate every moment of experience, The Present Moment is a must-read for all who are interested in the latest thinking about human experience.

 

About the Author

Daniel N. Stern, M.D., is Honorary Professor of Psychology at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at the Cornell Medical School. He is author of the acclaimed The Interpersonal World of the Infant, among other notable titles.

ISBN: 0-393-70429-7
Winter 2004
Cloth, 320 pages