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Unformulated Experience is a rich, complex, and evocative book that accepts the death of the metapsychology as a given and goes on to attempt “a portrayal of what clinical psychoanalysis might be in an interpretive, constructivist, hermeneutically conceived world” (p. xiii). The strength of the book lies in its eloquent presentation of opposing perspectives concerning how experience is organized and represented in the mind; its weakness lies in its flawed attempt at the synthesis of these oppositions.
The thesis is set with the first sentences of the preface:
Psychoanalysts have always understood that we can reflect on experience only when it exists in verbal form. What we have not adequately considered in American psychoanalysis is the nature of language itself. For if language is not merely a set of tags or labels for experience, but actually plays a role in constituting it, we are challenged to change our conception of what it means for experience to be unconscious. (p. xi)
In carrying his thesis forward, Stern makes the following major points:
An individual's experience has no natural or intrinsic organization; it is organized by interpretion. For experience to be knowable, it must be interpreted.
This is a basic tenet that constructivist and hermeneutic accounts have in common.
All interpretation is linguistic; all thought is linguistic. Language is the condition for experiencing. What is experienced as “nonverbal” is linguistic as well. We cannot step outside language anymore than we can experience stimuli outside the range of our senses.
Relationships, like all other aspects of human experience, are structured by language. Transference itself is a linguistic phenomenon.
We then come to the opposing perspective, which stands as an antithesis to the first: the words we use either “‘fit’ the shape of what we wanted to say, or do not fit.” Thus we have a sense of “something coming before language” (p. 15) to which language refers, more or less well. Gadamer (1975, 19