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Reflection is at the centre of the psychoanalytic experience. In his book, Unformulated Experience, Donnel Stern specifies and defines the conditions necessary for creative reflection. It is his contention that only by finding words that grasp pre-reflective, unformulated experiences is it possible to have the perspective to see and think about one's life meaningfully. Once unconscious experience is consciously reflected upon, it is shaped not only by the past but also by the language by which it is described. The book is an ambitious work that brings together hermeneutic theory, most specifically the work of Gadamer, and interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis, particularly a contemporary reading of the work of Harry Stack Sullivan. Stern's view is that all understanding emerges from an interaction, shaped by the individual qualities of both participants and acquiring unique properties from their engagement with each other. From this interpersonal field, both imaginative understanding and dissociation of unformulated experiences may result. Which of these outcomes occurs depends on the nature of the interpersonal engagement at any particular moment.
A central proposition of his book is that dissociation keeps unformulated experiences from ever becoming conscious; in contrast, repression extrudes ‘fully formed unconscious content’ from consciousness. Through dissociation the interpretation of experience is avoided; no concept and therefore no language is applied to the experience. These experiences lack the clarity and differentiation for the usual defensive operations to be applied; they are not formed enough to distort or forget. In work with traumatised patients, these are familiar ideas. However, Stern has introduced the concepts in relation to psychoanalytic work in a manner that affords a greater appreciation of their application to all patients and all people.
In the first section of the book, Stern lays out the paradox of experience being both pre-existing