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In this wide-ranging yet pithy book, unformulated experience is described as “mentation characterized by lack of clarity and differentiation” and as “the uninterpreted form of those raw materials of conscious, reflective experience that may eventually be assigned verbal interpretations and thereby brought into articulate from” (p. 37). Formulated understanding, then, is the product of a dialogic process embedded in the individual's relationship with another person, an idea, or a thing. Writing in densely textured but surprisingly accessible prose, Donnel Stern exhaustively develops this theme, including the place of dissociation and its opposite—imaginative understanding—in both the clinical encounter and life itself. Along the way the reader is offered introductory discussions of postmodernism, poststructuralism, constructivism, hermeneutics, linguistics, and their variants. These philosophical strands are deftly intertwined with seminal interpersonalist concepts such as embeddedness, autocentricity versus allocentricity, contextualization in the interpersonal field, the cognitively organizing role of the self-system, and parataxis as opposed to syntaxis. Effectively enacting his own ideas about the interpretive process, the author presents his arguments in socratic fashion. He poses questions, complicates them, fashions a response, and then interrogates his own answer. This dialectical mode invites a similar freedom of inquiry in the reader, which makes reading Stern's book an exercise in active learning and “meaning making.”
In the first section, Stern explains that postmodernists of his stripe (including constructivists and hermeneuticists) believe that experience is fundamentally “ambiguous” and that it becomes conscious and understood through the process of interpreting it from a given vantage point. By rendering our experience into language, we structure and organize it along certain interpretive lines. Different perspectives offer differing “partial truths,”