Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis (Relational Perspectives Book Series)

In this powerful and wonderfully accessible meditation on psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, and social constructivism, Donnel Stern explores the relationship between two fundamental kinds of experience: explicit verbal reflection and "unformulated experience," or experience we have not yet reflected on and put into words. Stern is especially concerned with the process by which we come to formulate the unformulated. It is not an instrumental task, he holds, but one that requires openness and curiosity; the result of the process is not accuracy alone, but experience that is deeply felt and fully imagined.

Stern's sense of explicit verbal experience as continuously constructed and emergent leads to a central dialectic at the heart of his work: that between curiosity and imagination, on one hand, and dissociation and unthinking acceptance of the familiar on the other. The goal of psychoanalytic work, he holds, is the freedom to be curious, whereas defense signifies the denial of this freedom. We defend against our fear of what we would think, that is, if we allowed ourselves the freedom to think it.

Stern also shows how the unconscious itself can be reconceptualized hermeneutically, and he goes on to explore the implications of this viewpoint on interpretation and countertransference. He is especially persuasive in showing how the interpersonal field, which is continuously in flux, limits the experience that it is possible for participants to reflect on. Thus it is that analyst and patient are together "caught in the grip of the field," often unable to see the kind of relatedness in which they are mutually involved.

A brilliant demonstration of the clinical consequentiality of hermeneutic thinking, Unformulated Experience bears out Stern's belief that psychoanalysis is as much about the revelation of the new in experience as it is about the discovery of the old

"Unformulated Experience is not the usual pastiche of poststructuralist and hermeneutical theories stuck onto psychoanalysis like so many bandaids.  Stern has evoked a magisterial, coherent theoretical frame of reference that places psychoanalysis (particularly post-Sullivanian interpersonalism) firmly within the postmodern critique of language; and he elaborates with great clarity and wonderfully frank vignettes the clinical implications of this position for contemporary psychoanalysis.  The book will surely find its audience among those interested in psychoanalytic theory and practice.  Even the most pragmatic clinician will find its clinical implications clarifying and useful.  Unformulated Experience is a major contribution."  - Edgar Levenson, M.D., William Alanson White Institute

"Unformulated Experience is a book of complexity, courage, and verve.  Donnel Stern combines Gadamer's hermeneutics and Sullivan'e interpersonal psychoanalysis in a move that separates him from the crowd of theorists who claim to integrate postmodern theory with psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.  By doing so, he is able to guide us in confronting, understanding, and treating some of the most puzzling phenomena in the field today, such as trauma, dissociation, and multiplicity.  Our ideas about memory, language, and the self will never be the same after this book - neither will our therapeutic practices nor our individual lives.  At long last, our profession has produced a book worthy of being linked with the best of modern hermeneutic thought.  Savor it." - Philip Cushman, Ph.D., author, Constructing the Self, Constructing America

"Donnel Stern tackles issues that so often fall in the seams of psychoanalytic thought.  What kind of intentionality is there in the act of verbalization; in using one set of words rather than another; in actively but unconsciously avoiding certain sets of words, and with them, certain meanings?  To answer these and other challenging questions, Stern skillfully weaves together an extraordinary tapestry of ideas, drawing on philosophy, literature, psychoanalytic theory, and a rich array of clinical experiences.  For its brilliant illumination of issues that are fundamental to all clinical theory, and for its cogent, systematic development of the author's own constructivist viewpoint, imaginatively applied to the psychoanalytic situation, I believe this book will emerge as a landmark contribution to the field." - Irwin Z. Hoffman, Ph.D., Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis