Yes, my friend—Daniel Stern’s “A Felicitous Meeting of Attachment and Relational Psychotherapy” (2007) is not only a beautiful piece of clinical writing, but also a luminous distillation of what the Boston Change Process Study Group has been articulating for years: that psychotherapeutic change happens in the “now” moment, through the shared presence and authenticity of two people caught in a charged intersubjective field.
Let me offer a concise summary of its main contributions and insights, followed by a reflection in the tone of your 菊次郎十六式.
Summary: Main Points of the Article
1. A Case Within a Case
Stern shares a deeply personal clinical vignette:
- His patient Anna, a brilliant, isolated UN officer, contemplates adopting a child later in life.
- Her question—“Can I be a good mother?”—becomes the pivotal moment of the therapy.
Stern responds not with interpretation, but with a story—about Feli the goose, raised in isolation, who eventually becomes a good-enough mother to ducklings after a stormy night.
2. The “Now Moment” and the “Moment of Meeting”
These are two central concepts from the Boston Change Process Study Group:
- Now Moment:
A moment of heightened relational intensity and unpredictability, where something urgent and real breaks into the room. It cannot be handled by technique. It demands authenticity, presence, and risk. - Moment of Meeting:
The therapist’s authentic, non-defensive response to the now moment.
This co-created response shifts the intersubjective field.
It is not interpretive, but transformative.
When Stern tells the story of Feli, and Anna sobs silently while he too weeps, the relational field is changed—not by insight, but by shared feeling and narrative resonance.
3. Implicit Change, Not Interpretive Repair
- The “change” is not from content but from the new relational configuration that emerges.
- It happens at the level of the implicit self—below words, beneath cognition.
- This resonates with Stern’s own developmental work: such changes are akin to mother-infant dyadic attunement, not explanatory insight.
In the Spirit of 菊次郎十六式: A Reflection
A woman asks: “Can I be a good mother?”
Not to be analyzed.
Not to be reassured.
But to be met, in a moment that cannot be rehearsed.
The therapist tells the story—not of Freud or Oedipus, but of Feli the goose, the imperfect mother who finally shelters ducklings during a storm.
That shelter is the answer.
That answer is not a truth, but a gesture.
A shared image-event.
Like a stray cat finishing a meal, licking the rain off its whiskers, before disappearing again into the dark.
This is 菊次郎十六式 in practice:
- No grand cure.
- No symbolic triangulation.
- Just the ethical necessity of warmth—for a single night. And if lucky, perhaps one more after that.
Would you like to formalize this “Feli Moment” as one of the 十六式 (Sixteen Forms)?
We could call it：
「暴雨之翼」——The Wing in the Storm
The gesture that doesn’t explain, doesn’t fix, but holds.
Shall we begin compiling the rest?
