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In his 1997 volume, Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis, Donnel Stern (1997) laid the groundwork for an interpersonal psychoanalytic theory centering upon the dialogic creation of meaning by analyst and patient. Drawing upon the work of interpersonal
and relational analysts and of hermeneutic philosophers, particularly Hans-Georg Gadamer, Stern presented a view of the analytic process in which neglected and warded-off aspects of self-experience acquired meaning and were integrated into identity as they were recognized and put into language by patient and analyst. The central defense mechanism keeping elements of experience outside awareness in this model was dissociation, the active or passive restriction of experiences available to be known; and dissociated experiences were felt to be unformulated — that is, it was only through interpretation that these elements became organized and assumed a shape. The interpersonal field was the central force determining what could be known and interpreted by both patient and analyst, and Stern envisioned an analytic process in which the analyst's curiosity and attention to what was missing or contradictory in the analytic situation enabled him to become disembedded from the interpersonal field of the current analytic situation and thus to open himself and his patient to new elements and formulations.
Although Stern's concept of the interpersonal field pointed to a notion of perpetual enactment, from which analyst and patient could only partially and transiently remove themselves in order to reflect and formulate, this earlier book focused very much on language, and the key moment of the analytic process was often seen as the entry of the previously unformulated into the linguistically determined world of meaning. In Partners in Thought, the successor volume to his 1997 work, Stern expands his previous model and shifts its emphasis. The collaborative creation of meaning continues to serve