Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy and Development by Daniel N. Stern

Forms of VitalityDaniel N. Stern,jpg

01-31-14

Dan Stern’s Vitality:

Review: Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy and Development. Daniel N. Stern, MD Oxford U Press.

By Nathan M. Szajnberg, MD , Managing Editor.

Vitality is being alive, sensing authenticity: it means movement. If I say Stern’s last book is inspiring, I use a vitality form — “inspire,” to breathe in, to move air with one’s body — to sense this. Stern’s final book is a gem, it both reinvigorates energic concepts of early psychoanalysis and connects this to what happens between two people. He describes the “atoms” (vitality) of what make up the “molecules” of our emotional and sensed life.

The book has three parts: 1. dynamic forms of vitality and arousal systems; 2. vitality in time-based arts (dance, music, theater, cinema); 3. developmental and clinical implications of understanding vitality forms. At moments, this very short book reads like precis for several longer studies; Stern says at times, that a subject goes beyond this book; one is tempted to ask him to take us the route to the beyond.

Because Stern deals with something so fundamentally human, something basic, as we read, listen to him, we also can read and explore our senses to understand what he has discovered, what he tries to teach us. Begin with a sigh, for instance. One can make different types of sighs: of relief, of exhaustion, possibly a sharp sigh of offense or even haughteur. Each sigh begins physically with an inspiration (but it begins before that with some sensed experience).

But, notice that the sensed experience is one of movement: one’s diaphragm first down, then upwards, then the movement of air and our sensing this movement. Vitality forms depend on movement.

Movement has four “daughters”: 1. Force (within or behind); 2. time contour; 3. space; and 4. directionality.

Vitality is the dynamics of force in motion, change, and is composed of force, time, space, directionality and movement.

But, force has varying intensities, varying time contours. It can be exploding, pulsating, fading, surging, fleeting, powerful, gentle, languorous and so on. Dynamics describes the “how” of sensed experience. Death is the antonym of vitality: movement, even the subtle tonicity of skin muscles, stops.

Note what Stern later distinguishes more clearly: vitality has sensed feelings, but it is not the same as (discrete) emotions, such as happy, sad, angry, fearful, and others. Vitality influences the contours of the discrete emotions. For instance, as Ekman has shown, while we all experience anger, we have individual profiles of quickness to anger onset, peak anger and the refractory period following anger when we are less receptive to the reality of the external world. Vitality can color anger so that it is raging or restrained, simmering or boiling, slow on onset (like President Obama) or eruptive onset.

Stern’s arts section reveals his intimacy with professionals of movement, particularly dancers and choreographers. He was a childhood friend of Jerome Robbins, and the dance study was an early laboratory for Dan’s studies. Just as Ekman studied Tibetan lamas to learn about mastery of negative emotions, so Stern studied masters of movement to learn about normative movement. “Tensions, forces, and excitement rise and fall.” (p. 75). While different art forms have different criteria for aesthetic beauty (Vitruvius for architecture; rhythm, pitch, dynamics for music; perspective, color, form for painting, to name a few), all time-based arts (at least) share dynamic criteria that cross the boundaries of the specific art form. For example, Balanchine’s choreography for the Bach Double Violin Concerto captures in movement what is dynamically heard in music. Paul Ricoeur portrayed this visually by a scalloping movement of his hand to show that dynamic criteria can cross artistic boundaries, unite certain arts (personal communication). As Stern says, “Vitality forms operate in all modalities and presumably elicit similar felt states.” (p. 76). Certain art movements tried to collaborate in order to create a unity in arts (the WienerWerkstatte, the Bauhaus). Stern goes through dance, music, theater and cinema to articulate how each expresses vitality forms, dynamics. While terms differ (sforzando for attack in music; Laban’s concepts of strong-light, direct-flexible and sustained-quick in movement), they share felt-concepts. He also alludes to culture differences in dynamics, but here tells us it will go beyond the book. For those interested, Forrestine Pauley has a dance chapter in Lomax’s book on culture differences in folk art.

Stern’s section on development (and neurobiology) of vitality movement grabs us. He presents data for both early movement in gestation, and modification of dynamics of movement by six months gestation. This suggests an inherent quality of movement, one prior to interaction with another. But, these inherent movements develop in various ways depending on interacting with a dedicated caregiver. This leads to Stern’s discovery of affect attunement, which arises around six to eight months post-birth. But, Stern’s fundamental concepts share those from ethology (and Bowlby’s work on attachment): an inborn system of readiness —- one not taught — leaps into action when met by the correct parental response: the nodding red-tinged beak of the seagull parent elicits infant beak opening; the nodding head/eyes of the adult (or a mask) elicits a social smile in the two-month old infant. Stern begins with this, then elaborates much further. That is, we can consider the readiness for vitality a form of the energic hypothesis (something sitting in the organism) even prior to meeting the caregiver, but expressed by the appropriate caregiver stimulus.

We can find another conceptual predecessor to Stern’s vitality work: Reich’s ideas about character as it is “encased” in body and early version of what Stern elaborates in far greater detail.

The third section of Stern’s gem applies these ideas to psychotherapy. He and the Boston Change Group have written about this extensively and I will not review it here.

Stern has left us a shining legacy, something that can redirect our thinking about real dynamics — the vital movements in our souls and bodies. His work can help us look more carefully at what happens within treatment without much of the larded jargon that can obfuscate the elegant moments of analysis.

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