In 1961, Stern was member of the Freedom Riders, a group of black and white activists challenging racial segregation in the south by traveling together on bus rides.
Through much of his career, Stern worked in New York City as a professor at Weill Cornell Medicine and a lecturer at Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.
[10] In the 'next life period, age two to seven months, the infant gains enough experience...[to] create an organizing subjective perspective that can be called a sense of a core self'.
'[12] Thereafter, at the next stage of the subjective self, 'for there to be an intersubjective exchange about affect...the mother must go beyond true imitations, which have been an enormous and important part of her social repertoire during the first six months or so', and develop 'a theme-and-variation format...purposeful misattunements'.
[14] (2) In a later edition of The Interpersonal World — 'revisiting a book written fifteen years earlier' — Stern added two more layers to his hierarchy of the self: the 'core self-with-another' preceding the subjective self; and finally the 'narrative self, or selves',[15] developing out of the verbal self.
[17] In The Motherhood Constellation, Stern describes a mother's instinctual focus on and devotion to her infant as being critical to the child's development.
[19] Stern stressed how early experiences of mother-child interaction 'have a beginning, a middle, and an end and a line of dramatic tension; they are tiny narratives ... 'proto-narrative envelopes'.