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IV. H. North American Relational, Interpersonal and Self Psychology Perspectives Characteristically, emphasis here is on immediate emerging experience, with little need for concepts of symbolization. However, for some, the concept is present, albeit in the notion of its noted absence, i.e. in dissociative enactments and unformulated experiences. Such experiences canot be symbolized, but experienced through processes of ‘implicit relational knowing’. Others engage at various levels of discourse and the depths of psychic life, not excluding metapsychology, subjectivity and internalized affective-relational experience. Donnel Stern ’s (1990, 1997, 2003, 2004, 2010) theory of enactments is an extension and elaboration of his work on unformulated experience (1997), a dissociation-based perspective of the unconscious. Developing further Philip Bromberg’s (1998, 2000) thinking of enactments as the result of dissociation, when conflict does not exist, Stern (2004) writes: “1. Enacted experience , and thus dissociated states as well, cannot be symbolized and therefore do not exist in any other explicit form than enactment itself. Enacted experience is unformulated experience. 2. Dissociated states , because they are unsymbolized , do not and cannot bear a conflictual relationship to the states of mind safe enough for us to identify as “me” and inhabit in a consciously appreciable way. 3. Enactment is the interpersonalization of dissociation: the conflict that cannot be experienced within one mind is experienced between or across two minds. Each participant therefore has only a partial appreciation of what is transpiring. 4. Enactment is the absence of internal conflict. 5. Enactment ends in the achievement of internal conflict, which occurs when the two dissociated states, one belonging to each participant in the enactment, can be formulated inside the consciousness of one or the other of the two psychoanalytic participants.” (Stern 2004, p. 213, emphasis added) An exception among Relational thinkers, Lew Aron (1992a,b) advocates the relational- perspectivist epistemological stance. Writing on the primal scene, Aron (1995) points to a need for both a notion of gender identity and a notion of gender multiplicity. He argues that the omnipotent wish “to have it all”, to fulfill symbolically the phantasy of being both sexes, can be used constructively and needs to be appreciated as a valuable human motive. In this vein, he views the internalization of the primal scene as potentiating and reflecting the capacity to hold two contrasting ideas in mind simultaneously. This psychic achievement becomes possible with, and contributes to, the capacity for symbolic thought, for sustaining ambiguity, and for creativity. Aron uses Melanie Klein's (1929) notion of the combined parent figure and the classical concept of the primal scene as metaphors that illuminate the capacity to hold two contrasting ideas in mind at once without either fusing them or splitting them apart, within the context of emerging subjectivity and intersubjectivity. While the combined parent figure starts out as a symbolic equation (Segal, 1957), that functions in the paranoid-schizoid mode, with the working through of the depressive position, there is a differentiation of the elements that make up the combined parent figure. The parents
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