Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis [Paperback]

Part I: Experience Formulated and Unformulated. The Given and the Made: A Constructivist View. Unformulated Experience: An Introduction. Familiar Chaos: Unformulated Experience as Defense. Creative Disorder and Unbidden Perceptions: Unformulated Experience as Possibility. Part II: Reconsidering Self-Deception: Toward a Theory of Dissociation. Imagination and Creative Speech: Thoughts on Dissociation and Formulation. Not-Spelling-Out: Dissociation in the Strong Sense. Narrative Rigidity: Dissociation in The Weak Sense. The Problem of the Private Self: Unformulated Experience, the Interpersonal Field, and Multiplicit. Part III: Unformulated Experience in the Work of the Analyst. Interpretation and Subjectivity: A Phenomenology of Resistance. The Analyst's Unformulated Experience of the Patient. Gadamer's Hermeneutics: A Philosophy for the Embedded Analyst. Courting Surprise: Unbidden Perceptions in Clinical Practice.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 lC}