Daniel Stern (psychoanalyst)

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Daniel Norman Stern (born August 16, 1934 in New York City , † November 12, 2012 in Geneva ) was an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst . As a child and youth analyst, he was one of the leading specialists in empirical infant research . In doing so, he was guided by a psychoanalytically oriented understanding of personality, but did not observe everyday situations, as was practiced by his psychoanalytic predecessors, but created experimental situations. In 1999, Stern was awarded the International Sigmund Freud Prize for Psychotherapy .

Theories

Forms of self-esteem

In the newborn, Stern distinguished between six states of the psyche and body of the infant immediately after the first few weeks after birth:

  • regular sleep with your eyes closed and breathing regularly
  • irregular sleep with movements of the face and limbs
  • Semi-awake state: the eyes are open but there is no activity.
  • Awake activity: the eyes are wide open and follow moving objects.
  • wakeful movements with diffuse motor movements
  • Discomfort expressed by screaming

His research was only carried out in the fourth phase (guard activity). Since infants cannot of course be interviewed, Daniel Stern showed the babies pictures in order to measure their visual preferences based on the duration of the observation of the pictures. Pictures of the mother were looked at longer than pictures of strangers. Daniel Stern saw this as proof of the assumption of a preverbal, subjective experience of the infant. His theory was based on the assumption that there is a self that exists long before self-confidence and language. This self is characterized by a sense of wholeness, intentionality, a primitive understanding of time and activity.

Through his research, he developed a theory in which there are four (or five) forms of self-esteem that build on one another and last throughout life. His theory took the place of a model of the developmental phases and the instinct. Critics doubt Daniel Stern's empirical infant research because he only refers to one phase, namely that of waking activity.

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Many also believe that his research was inadequate because it was only about affects and deeper feelings were excluded. Daniel Stern also did not take into account the results of psychoanalytic infant research.

Development of the self

Based on his research, Daniel Stern divided the creation of the self into the following phases:

  1. the emerging self (age: the development phase of the emerging self is completed with 2-3 months - until the end of life)
  2. the core self (age: from 3–7 months to the end of life)
  3. the subjective self (age: from 7–9 months to the end of life)
  4. the verbal self (age: from 15-18 months until the end of life)
  5. the narrative self = more developed form of the verbal self, from approx. 3–4. Year of life until the end of life

Emerging self

“Touching an object can allow visual identification of the object without ever having seen it [...] Stern advocated the thesis that infants have the preformed ability to produce such integrations, and that they are already born with the need and the ability to extract abstract representations from the primary perceptual properties. "

Core self

The core self presupposes the experience of so-called four invariances :

  • Self-authorship: For example, seeing it get dark when the child closes their eyes.
  • Self-coherence: The feeling of being a physical whole as a center of action.
  • Self-affectivity: The experience of similar emotional qualities over and over again.
  • Self-historicity: feeling of constant being that allows one to change and still remain the same person.

Subjective Self

“The intersubjective self is extracted from the frequent episodes and viewed as the inner working model of the emerging self. The working model that can best summarize most of the episodes becomes constitutive. For example, a person may have the […] work model about themselves, which assumes that the average object responds lovingly, takes pride in success, and responds supportively when it fails. Such a model would at least portray itself as 'basic trust'. "

In other words, the child's perception is expanded in such a way that all previous processes are subjective and peculiar and other people have their perceptions that (in part) differ from those of the child. The question arises as to how this possibility of differentiation arises or how the inner states of others can be "read or felt". According to Stern, the following three elements are important:

Amodal perception

The amodal ability to perceive serves to filter what is common from the various perceptions. Star characterizes commonality through intensity, time and shape, without this artificial division of the events into individual phenomena being explained.

Vitality affects

These are affects that express vital feelings . In contrast to the so-called categorical affects, which have certain affects as content (anger, sadness, joy, etc.), vitality affects do not have any definable categories, but are best described in metaphors (“feel elated”, “burst with energy "," Not getting going "," being devastated "). These different feelings of feeling alive can be read by others through movement, gestures and facial expressions.

Affekt - Attunement (vote)

Stern coined the term attunement , a term for which the term rapport or contingency is mostly used in German . The terminology is difficult to translate and means the very complex process of how two people tune into each other in their rhythm and feelings and then share inner states with each other. Among other things, the game with amodal correspondences between mother and child should be mentioned here: the mother translates the child's movements and cheerful mood into sounds, rhythms, nods of the head, etc. This sharing of the inner state brings about the creation of similarities through playful interaction on an amodal level.

Verbal self

"For the 15 to 18 months the child develops a new subjective form of representation, which is related to the fact that it can participate in the global knowledge of the other, in which [ sic symbolically reflects] it knowledge through language, communicates, shares and even new creates. "

See also

Fonts

  • Mother and Child: The First Relationship. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.) 1977, ISBN 0-674-30432-2 .
    • German: mother and child - the first relationship. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-608-91685-7 .
  • The narrative self. In: Peter Buchheim, Manfred Cierpka , Theodor Seifert (eds.): The narrative - what is told from life. Springer, Berlin 1998, pp. 1-13 ( PDF ).
  • The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. Norton, New York 2004, ISBN 0-393-70429-7 .
  • The infant's life experience. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-608-95687-5 .

literature

  • Martin Dornes : The competent baby. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-596-11263-X .
  • Vera Müller: Preverbal Worlds - Infant Research and Its Contribution to Theory and Practice of Art Therapy. In: Ruth Hampe et al. (Ed.): Art, design and therapy with children and adolescents. Documentation for the 11th annual meeting of the IGKGT at the University of Bremen. University literature store, Bremen 1999.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Daniel Stern. Obituary. In: New York Times . November 14, 2012, accessed November 23, 2016.
  2. ^ È morto lo psicanalista Daniel Stern. ( Italian ). In: Corriere della Sera . November 14, 2012, accessed November 23, 2016.
  3. ↑ a b c d Rainer Krause : General psychoanalytical disease theory, Volume 2, Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1998, pp. 172–176.
  4. ↑ Vera Müller: Preverbal Worlds - Infant Research and its Contribution to Theory and Practice of Art Therapy. In: Ruth Hampe et al. (Ed.): Art, design and therapy with children and adolescents. Documentation for the 11th annual meeting of the IGKGT at the University of Bremen. University literature store, Bremen 1999, p. 106 ff.
personal data
SURNAME Stern, Daniel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stern, Daniel Norman (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst
DATE OF BIRTH August 16, 1934
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH November 12, 2012
Place of death Geneva