Sorting Out the Parts and Wholes: Discussion of Steven Stern’s “Analytic Adoption of the Psychically Homeless”

ABSTRACT

In this discussion, the author considers Steven Stern’s notion of the “analytic adoption of the psychically homeless” (p. 24–42) as a further articulation and extension of the project begun in his recent book, Needed Relationships and Psychoanalytic Healing: A Holistic Relational Perspective on the Therapeutic Process (2017). Stern is suggesting a conscious, eyes-wide-open acceptance and willingness on the part of the analytic therapist to consider, in the case of the psychically homeless patient, an extended delay, suspension, or even a conscious relinquishment of the expectation that a successful or good enough treatment will, at some point, require a termination phase, or some kind of typical ending. Stern’s concepts of psychic homelessness and mutual analytic adoption begin to give language, legitimacy, and most importantly, clinical dignity, to very long-term treatments that span years and decades. As helpful as it is to name this clinical phenomenon, this author suggests that in doing so, Stern runs the risk of giving a unique experience the quality of a speech act - a kind of declarative wholeness - that to this author’s mind, goes against the very freshness and specificity that Stern is wanting us to grant each dyad deeply involved in the process of shaping a unique meaningful needed relationship. That said, this author concludes that Stern’s bold work opens up this entire therapeutic realm for our open-minded and open-hearted future exploration.

KEYWORDS:

• Clinical generosity
• dignity
• long-term analysis

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Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Corpt

Elizabeth Corpt, MSW, LICSW, is a psychoanalyst, Past-President, Board Member, Faculty, and Supervising  Analyst at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, Teaching Associate, Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry at the Cambridge Health Alliance Program for Psychotherapy, and Co-Chief Editor of Psychoanalysis, Self and Context. She is in private practice in Arlington, MA