Thinking Absence: A Discussion of “The Analyst’s Necessary Nonsovereignty and the Generative Power of the Negative”

Abstract

I begin by discussing the nature of the negative in McGleughlin’s paper (this issue), offering some examples of my own from the films of Kubrick and Malick. I go on to address how the negative can be a relational conception, as I read McGleughlin to suggest, and the role of destabilization as a clinical process in work with the negative, as well as in work with states of mind that allow representation. I end with a discussion of the application of a controversy over Lacan’s conception of the Real to the idea of the negative, and I suggest that analysts need to cultivate, for different kinds of psychic phenomena, both nonsovereignty and creative, expanded sovereignty.

This article refers to:

The Analyst’s Necessary Nonsovereignty and the Generative Power of the Negative

View responses to this article:

The Impossibility of Meaning: Joining and Rejoining: Reply to Cooney, Ferro, and Stern

Notes

¹ Let me skip ahead and preview a position I take later in this essay: only some unrepresented states are due to psychic absence, not all of them. Unformulated experience is a presence, not an absence, even though it qualifies as unrepresented.

² While I, too, admire Ferro’s work, I have made related observations about it, arguing that Bionian field theory omits the subjectivity of the analyst (the analyst’s “vulnerability,” in McGleughlin’s language) in important respects (Stern, 2013).

³ I thank Stephen Seligman for recognizing that this point needed to be made explicit.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Donnel B. Stern

Donnel B. Stern, Ph.D., is Training and Supervising Analyst, William Alanson White Institute; Adjunct Clinical Professor and Clinical Consultant, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; Founder and Editor of the “Psychoanalysis in a New Key” book series at Routledge; former Editor-in-Chief, Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He serves as Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and is on the editorial boards of several other journals. His recent books include Relational Freedom: Emergent Properties of the Interpersonal Field (2015) and The Infinity of the Unsaid: Unformulated Experience, Language, and the Nonverbal (2018).