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Unformulated Experience is a profound and provocative examination of psychoanalytic epistemology: the “mystery at the heart of knowing” (p. 221). In this beautifully written book, Stern explores the implications “of what clinical psychoanalysis might be in an interpretive, constructivist, hermeneutically conceived world” (p. xiii). His views are rooted in the propositions that (1) existence is indeterminate by reasons of its fundamental
structure (Merleau-Ponty); and (2) there is a reality that exists beyond words, but it is not one that we will ever be able to sense directly (Gadamer). Only through the creative and imaginative act of language can we grasp, as we give shape to, the inherently ambiguous contents of “reality.”
For Stern, reality is neither simple nor objective. It is never “uncovered,” but must be constituted (constructed) by an act of speech and imagination that is creative, dialectical, dialogical, and limited by the very language used to describe what is felt to be known. “Language is not merely a set of tags or labels for experience but actually plays a role” (p. xi) in the construction of what we come to feel and call experience. In so doing, language simultaneously allows and limits the extent to which reality or experience can be grasped.
Stern's thinking is rooted in the works of philosophers such as Foucault, Gadamer, Habermas, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and Saussure. Therefore, the epistemological assumptions from which he begins are radically different from those of the nineteenth-century scientific materialism in which traditional classical psychoanalysis is grounded and have profound implications for psychoanalytic theory and practice. If there is no objectively determinable, unambiguous, unconscious reality covered up in the mind of the patient, if the contents of the unconscious are not fully formed, hidden by defense and awaiting discovery, then what do we mean when we talk of unconscious experience or say that we know something about the