Conversation during 2021 between Donnel B. Stern and Luis H. Ripoll

ABSTRACT

Donnel Stern and I met in the spring of 2016, when I was a fourth year candidate at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. He had begun teaching a new course there in interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis. I soon became fascinated with the contrast between the relational perspective and the classical one; the latter was more familiar to me from my education and training. In the years since, Don served as discussant in a clinical case presentation, and I have participated in a weekly study group he leads. More importantly, he functioned as one of several, crucial interlocutors that helped shape my development as a psychoanalyst. I came to understand his perspective further through an in-depth, critical study and consideration of his own work, mine, and that of others and came to count on him as a friend and colleague. What follows is a rather wide-ranging discussion between Don and me about his views and experiences as a psychoanalyst. It begins with an exploration of aspects of his life that affected his outlook on the profession of psychoanalysis, and then moves into a discussion about the nature of the practice itself. In the process, I expressed my own related but somewhat distinct views. Our conversation ventured freely into the meaning of each of our own experiences as psychoanalysts, with the hope that this may be of interest in thinking about psychoanalysis more generally. No part of the discussion is prescriptive regarding what psychoanalysis or a psychoanalyst should be. Our hope is that the interview provides an important articulation of Don’s unique theoretical perspective, but in a fashion that remains approachable. What follows is simply a discussion between two people from different backgrounds who found a way to explore a variety of significant ideas with one another.

KEYWORDS:

• Relational psychoanalysis
• dissociative enactment
• spontaneity
• curiosity
• ideology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Donnel B. Stern

Donnel B. Stern, Ph.D., is Training and Supervising Analyst at the William Alanson White Institute in New York City; Clinical Consultant and Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychology at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy; and Faculty, New York Psychoanalytic Institute. He is Founder and Editor of a book series at Routledge, “Psychoanalysis in a New Keyauthors,” and the former Editor-in-Chief of Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He has written and edited many books. The most recent book he has authored is The Infinity of the Unsaid: Unformulated Experience, Language, and the Nonverbal (2019).

Luis H. Ripoll

Luis H. Ripoll, M.D., was born in Cartagena, Colombia, and received his medical degree in 2006 from the University of Florida, studying neuroimaging of affective processing and self-recognition as part of their Research Track. He completed his psychiatric residency at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York in 2010, then completed a clinical research fellowship on the Neurobiology of Personality Disorders there, working under Larry Siever and Antonia New. Dr. Ripoll continued to work at Mount Sinai thereafter as attending psychiatrist at the World Trade Center Mental Health Program, offering lectures to other clinicians on mentalization and psychodynamic therapy for trauma and personality disorders. He completed psychoanalytic training at New York Psychoanalytic Institute (NYPSI) in 2018, after serving as Silvan Clinical Research Fellow, working with Wilma Bucci and Sherwood Waldron. He participates in a long-standing study group and co-teaches a course at NYPSI on Interpersonal and Relational Psychoanalysis, with Donnel Stern. He is also member of the Curriculum and Scientific Program Committees at NYPSI. Dr. Ripoll has given clinical research presentations on relational psychoanalysis, dream interpretation, neuropsychoanalytic formulations of empathy and self-representation, schizoid and borderline personality disorders, and attachment theory. He also serves on the boards of the the Psychoanalytic Research and Development Fund and the Psychoanalytic Research Consortium, where he pursues his interest in the empirical study of recordings of the psychoanalytic process. Dr. Ripoll is also in private practice in New York.