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The Present moment in psychotherapy and everyday life.

Article Excerpt
Stern, D. N. (2004). The Present moment in psychotherapy and everyday life. New York: W. W. Norton, 283 pp., ISBN 0-393-70429-7, $29.95 (hardcover).

In the beginning of his book, The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, Daniel N. Stern states that this "book is largely about certain [present] moments [that make up subjective experience and] that can change the course of psychotherapy as well as regular life" (p. 18). In his rigorous attempt to describe and understand these crucial and elemental present moments, Stern "relies heavily" on a phenomenological perspective. Consequently, Stern's text is like a breath of fresh air in the mainstream fields of psychology and psychotherapy in general and psychodynamic psychotherapies in particular. J. H. Van den Berg once referred to phenomenology as the science of examples. True to this spirit, Stern distills and extracts the structural essence of present moments in general and moments of meeting in particular by way of a microanalysis of examples taken from psychotherapy and everyday life.

Incidentally and interestingly, prior to finalizing what title to give his present text, Stern considers giving it a different title: A Phenomenological View of Psychotherapeutic Experience. The aim of his project is to describe and understand "the small but meaningful affective happenings that unfold in the seconds that make up now [the present moment in general and the moment of meeting, which is a special version of the present moment, in particular]" (p. 8). He finds in phenomenology the optimal approach to understanding the nature and structure of the subjective experience of the present moment to which, "until recently, mainstream academic psychology has had no pressing need to pay attention" (p. 137).

Although present moments are the "ordinary ... stuff of low-level everyday drama", they constitute "the archipeligo of islands of consciousness.... These islands are the psychological foreground, the primary reality of experience. The present and consciousness are the centers of gravity, not the past and the unconscious" (pp. 11 and 21). Present moments are whole happenings, gestalts. Fascinatingly, they can "capture a sense of the subject's style, personality, preoccupations, or conflict" (p. 16). Typically, these present moments are understood implicitly. Thus they create a background of implicit knowing in human relating. To communicate the lived sense of "implicit knowing," Stern cites a beautiful quotation from the work of the novelist...