Where, When, and What Is Now?

This review maintains that the book (see record 2004-00303-000) answers a number of central questions regarding the present moment: How does one capture the experience of the present moment? How does each of these fleeting experiences add up to the totality of one's life? What is the impact of the present on the past and on the future in everyday life and in the specialized sphere of psychotherapy? The reviewer found that Stern addresses a significant gap in the skill set of most human beings, a deficit that in fact is mirrored by an analogous problem in most contemporary psychological methods of observation and experimentation and by most of our theories. As a species, human beings are remarkably skilled at living in and attending to the past and future components of life. Stern's book addresses these issues in a complex, challenging, and ultimately highly successful way. He introduces a methodology (based on a semistructure interview that he dubs the “microanalytic technique”) for identifying and studying the present moment in everyday settings and presents the results of his work within a broad conceptual context that includes observations and examples from the neurosciences, dance, music, mother-child interaction studies, and psychotherapy settings. Having demonstrated how the present moment may be studied empirically, the author goes on to describe a hierarchy of types of present moments, which range from the ordinary and inconsequential to those that occur in an interpersonal and inter subjective context and that are marked by personal and emotional power. The second half of the book is an examination of the role of the present moment in psychological change and in psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy, which Stern describes in a jargon-free and ideology-free way. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)