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The author proposes a new theory for psychoanalysis. According to him, unconscious experience exists, but it does not exist in forms in which we can articulate. It remains to be interpreted. Unconscious experience and meaning is what he calls unformulated experience. Gadamer (a student of Heidegger), said that we can understand only what the language of our time and place allows. According to the author, understanding is dialogic. He agrees with Harry Stack Sullivan that the interpersonal field is the smallest meaningful unit of human living. The link between hermeneutics and unformulated experience is dissociation.
Unformulated experience bears the same relation to dissociation that fully formed unconscious content bears to repression. Unformulated experience is material that has never been brought into consciousness, not material that has been ejected from it. The interpersonal field is the context within which all events of dissociation and imaginative understanding take place. According to Sullivan, unlike repression, which deals with expulsion from awareness, the material he describes was never “there in the first place.” However, contrary to Sullivan, the author believes that each of us casts about for other people to play roles reciprocal to our own. According to the author, we know the object only by our interpretations of it. That spells the end of correspondence theory in psychoanalysis Learning happens when a space appears between experience and expectation This is true separately for analyst and patient
For Freud, each experience is recorded and permanently stored in the unconscious, which is therefore conceived of as a file or tape library For Sullivan, the self-system rejects all experiences that might be associated with anxiety.
The boldness of the author's theory contrasts with the pedestrian clinical material he provides His first example is of a woman who had never previously mentioned any infidelities on her husband's part, and who told her analyst t