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Unformulated Experience collects and elaborates on ideas, concepts, and issues that Donnei Stern has been addressing in numerous journal publications since the early 1980s. Of the work's twelve chapters, six (chapters 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, and 12) are revisions and expansions of four papers that have appeared in Contemporary Psychoanalysis between 1983 and 1991. Although the book's dust jacket exhibits glowing, admiring endorsements by several well-known analysts, I found the work to be inadequate.
Unformulated experience, the core idea of this work, is conceptualized as a major ingredient in a special kind of experiencing. It is “the uninterpreted form of those raw materials of conscious, reflective experience that may eventually be assigned verbal interpretations and thereby brought into articulate form” (p. 37), and is synonymous with “unconscious experience and meaning” (p. xi). Thus, by definition, an unformulated experience never had a verbal form, never had been conscious. An ancillary hypothesis, also central to Stern's thought, is that if and when any unformulated experience does become verbalized, whether by patient or analyst, that particular articulation is not unique. That is, an unformulated experience may lead to any one of a variety of different formulations, some more salient, focused, or clinically useful than others.
Stern asks, “What can be gained from a conception of unconscious meaning as unformulated?” (p. 36), and indicates that it will bring about
changes in our conception of defense …, changes in the way we understand our creation of conscious experience …, particular ways of grasping the process and outcome of clinical interpretation …, and a perspective on the analysis of transference and countertransference, or “breaking the grip of the field”. … (p. xi)
The crux of my critique is that the model and its implications are