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Stern, D. (2022) Feels Like Me: Formulating the Embodied Mind. Psychoanalytic Inquiry 42:232-243
- This model works when the unformulated experience in question can be represented in words.
- Unformulated experience: From familiar chaos to creative disorder.
- (1997). Unformulated experience: From dissociation to imagination in psychoanalysis.
- Partners in thought: Working with unformulated experience, dissociation, and enactment.
- The infinity of the unsaid: Unformulated experience, language, and the nonverbal.
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Stern, D. (2022) From Interpersonal Field to Mind in the Work of Philip Bromberg. Contemporary Psychoanalysis 58:285-291
- His most recent book is The Infinity of the Unsaid: Unformulated Experience, Language, and the Nonverbal (2019).
- The child embarks on a life in which the unformulated experience that could become anger provokes the child’s anxiety.
- Partners in thought: Working with unformulated experience, dissociation, and enactment.
- The infinity of the unsaid: Unformulated experience, language, and the nonverbal.
- His most recent book is The Infinity of the Unsaid: Unformulated Experience, Language, and the Nonverbal (2019).
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Stern, D. & Ripoll, L. (2022) Conversation During 2021 between Donnel B. Stern and Luis H. Ripoll. Psychoanalytic Inquiry 42:449-459
- The most recent book he has authored is The Infinity of the Unsaid: Unformulated Experience, Language, and the Nonverbal (2019).
- 451 In my understanding, the transformation of unformulated experience into livable meaning is the primary ongoing activity of the mind. Unformulated experience is not fully formed, requiring only discovery to become conscious; it is instead unformulated or potential experience, a vaguely organized, primitive, global, non-ideational, affective state.
- That’s what I mean by “the formulation of unformulated experience.” It has to percolate as long as it needs to, and then it arrives in our minds unbidden.
- The most recent book he has authored is The Infinity of the Unsaid: Unformulated Experience, Language, and the Nonverbal (2019).
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Stern, D. B. (1983) Unformulated Experience, —From Familiar Chaos to Creative Disorder. Contemporary Psychoanalysis 19:71-99
- The concept of unformulated experience makes no sense in an associationist theory.
- The unformulated must organize itself first.
- Sullivan's goal, then, should be broadened to include not only formulation of the unformulated, but also acceptance of unformulated experience as creative disorder.
- Not to have a thought means not to translate unformulated experience into language.
- Curiosity preserves the uncertainty in unformulated experience. Curiosity is the attitude by which unformulated experience is maintained as creative disorder.
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Stern, D. B. (1987) Unformulated Experience and Transference. Contemporary Psychoanalysis 23:484-490
- Prior to its description transference is not explicitly meaningful. Unformulated transference exists in a vague and indeterminate state which, if it were worded, could be spoken in more than one way, perhaps several ways.
- Until attention is directed toward it, and verbal description begun, it is only a tacit, indeterminate, unformulated experience (Stern, 1983) of the relationship between patient and analyst that exists for either one of them.
- Haven't I made it sound as if transference experience is either unformulated or co-operatively formulated?
- Not all the contrasts which occur in interaction with one analyst can occur in interaction with another, and so that part of the unformulated transference which can be spoken differs as well.
- Stern, D. 1983 Unformulated experience Contemp.
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Stern, D. B. (1988) Not Misusing Empathy. Contemporary Psychoanalysis 24:598-611
- Prior to its description, transference (and countertransference no less) is unformulated and not explicitly meaningful.
- What is more, these constructions are not even articulations of the patient's unformulated experience—they are products of the analyst's unformulated material.
- B. 1983 Unformulated experience Contemp.
- B. 1987 Unformulated experience and transference Contemp.
- (in press)The analyst's unformulated experience of the patient Contemp.
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Stern, D. B. (1989) The Analyst's Unformulated Experience of the Patient. Contemporary Psychoanalysis 25:1-33
- For Sullivan, unconscious material is not repressed but unformulated (1940, p. 185).
- Before returning to an explicit consideration of the analyst's experience of the patient, I now turn to unformulated experience. Unformulated Experience The patient reports a dream.
- The uncertainty of the unformulated is preserved, even nurtured.
- B. 1983 Unformulated experience Contemp.
- B. 1987 Unformulated experience and transference Contemp.
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Stern, D. B. (1990) Courting Surprise—Unbidden Perceptions in Clinical Practice. Contemporary Psychoanalysis 26:452-478
- It is from this vast fund of familiar and common understanding that unconscious expectations are drawn, and it is the articulation of these unformulated expectations that makes it possible to broaden and enrich our experience of the world.
- Other than these partial exceptions, though, and a general attitude of tolerance about it, this aspect of what transpired between us became part of the unformulated background of the sessions, the medium within which we spent the hours.
- B. 1983 Unformulated experience Contemp.
- B. 1985 Unformulated experience and transference Contemp.
- B. 1989 The analyst's unformulated experience of the patient Contemp.
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Stern, D. B. (1991) A Philosophy for the Embedded Analyst—Gadamer's Hermeneutics and the Social Paradigm of Psychoanalysis. Contemporary Psychoanalysis 27:51-80
- Out of all the unformulated possibilities, two people come to a way of being together in which certain behaviors and experiences are allowed and others are prohibited, and in which the degree of recognition of, or enforced blindness to, various aspects of experience is prescribed.
- 69 darkness, the same relation of articulated possibility to unformulated being. This event is often described in psychoanalysis as empathy, thought it is clear from Gadamer's stress on the analysis of preconceptions that he could not take such a view.
- B. 1987 Unformulated experience Contemp.
- B. 1985 Unformulated experience and transference Contemp.
- B. 1989 The analyst's unformulated experience of the patient Contemp.
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Stern, D. B. (1992) Commentary on Constructivism in Clinical Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 2:331-363
- I will briefly examine each in turn, with an eye to whether each phenomenon can be accounted for by the phenomenological conception of the unconscious as unformulated rather than as structured and merely hidden from view.
- If there is a separate “presence” in experience, an intrapsychic “other,” it is unformulated and invisible until it is articulated in language.
- (1983), Unformulated experience. Contemp.
- (1987), Unformulated experience and transference.
- (1989), The analyst's unformulated experience of the patient.
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Stern, D. B. (1994) Conceptions of Structure in Interpersonal Psychoanalysis—A Reading of the Literature. Contemporary Psychoanalysis 30:255-300
- (Think of Barnett's [1968], [1980a] areas of "not knowing" or his "systems of innocence, " Tauber and Green's [1959] "prelogical experience, " or of "unformulated experience" [Stern, 1983].)
- Such stretching and twisting of language around the unformulated is the only way that pockets or islands of unarticulated meaning can be prevented from coming to one's own attention, thereby entering the realm of language and threatening unacceptable levels of anxiety.
- For Stern, experience not organized in the form of verbal language is "unformulated." It cannot be referred to meaningfully, since such reference can only be made in the very medium (verbal language) through which the unformulated material cannot be conveyed.
- B. 1983 Unformulated experience Contemp.
- B. 1989a The analyst's unformulated experience of the patient Contemp.
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Stern, D. B. (1996) The Social Construction of Therapeutic Action. Psychoanalytic Inquiry 16:265-293
- Much of what is usually understood to be repressed, however, is conceptualized as unformulated, that is, as never having been known (Wolstein, 1982; Stern, 1983).
- (1983), Unformulated experience. Contemp.
- (1989), The analyst's unformulated experience of the patient.
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Stern, D. B. (1996) Dissociation and Constructivism: Commentary on Papers by Davies and Harris. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 6:251-266
- Therefore, the heart of treating a patient whose problems in living in the present are rooted in dissociation of the past is articulating the unformulated experience of the transference-countertransference—that is, the intense experience of the treatment that is mutually shared and constructed by the patient and the analyst.
- I have myself contributed a psychoanalytic perspective related to these problems, the idea of unformulated experience (Stern, 1983, 1985, 1989), and that idea appears in a supporting role in what follows.
- (1983), Unformulated experience. Contemp.
- (1985), Unformulated experience and transference.
- (1989), The analyst's unformulated experience of the patient.
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Stern, D. B. (2000) The Limits of Social Construction: Commentary on Paper by Cynthia Dyess and Tim Dean. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 10:757-769
- Stern Training and Supervising Analyst at the William Alanson White Institute; Faculty at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; author of Unformulated Experience (1997); and a member of the editorial boards of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and Psychoanalytic Inquiry.
- The Editors of Psychoanalytic Dialogues asked me to write this commentary not because I am an expert on Lacan (I am certainly not that), but because they were curious about the relation between what Dyess and Dean have to say and what I have written about under the rubric of unformulated experience (Stern, 1997).
- To properly address the question I had been posed by the Editors, I found I had no choice but to delve into other questions: the nature of the unconscious, both as I think about it and as I understand Lacan to conceive it; the differences in the conceptions of language in Lacan and in hermeneutics, which has been a major source of inspiration for me; the Imaginary and the Symbolic registers in Lacan's thought, and how they relate to the Real; and the two ways Lacan wrote about the Real at different times in his theorizing, and what each had to do with unformulated experience. To do an adequate job of describing the forest, I lost the forest for the trees.
- (1997), Unformulated Experience. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
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Stern, D. B. (2001) Review Essay: Constructivism, Dialectic, and Mortality. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 11:451-468
- He is the author of Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis, and serves on the editorial boards of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, and Psychoanalytic Psychology.
- (1983), Unformulated experience. Contemp.
- (1997), Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis.
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Stern, D. B. (2002) Language and the Nonverbal as a Unity: Discussion of “Where is the Action in the ‘Talking Cure’?”*. Contemporary Psychoanalysis 38:515-525
- One realm is wholly nonverbal, the realm I have elsewhere called “unformulated experience” (Stern, 1983, 1997).
- Articulated, verbal foreground and unformulated, nonverbal background define one another, shape one another, serve as the very possibility for one another's existence.
- Language is also all those parts of subjectivity that gather and hover, unformulated, around what we can already say.
- (1983), Unformulated experience. Contemp.
- (1997), Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psycho analysis.
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Stern, D. B. (2002) Words and Wordlessness in the Psychoanalytic Situation. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 50:221-247
- The divergence, though, is well described by the difference between self-reflection and unformulated experience. Reflection is then presented as situated in the unformulated background meanings that contextualize it.
- In the term I prefer, it is unformulated experience (Stern 1983, 1997).
- (1983). Unformulated experience. Contemp.
- The analyst's unformulated experience of the patient. Contemp.
- (1997). Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis.
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Stern, D. B. (2003) The Fusion of Horizons: Dissociation, Enactment, and Understanding. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 13:843-873
- To put the point in conventional psychoanalytic language: unformulated experience can be highly structured—though never so structured that multiple interpretations are excluded.
- Such hints, which amount to our recognition of our own, previously unformulated state of self, are often the first things that alert us to a shift in the analysand's self-state.
- Experience is formulated and unformulated, free in some ways and constricted in others.
- (1983), Unformulated experience. Contemp.
- (1997), Unformulated Experience. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
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Stern, D. B. (2004) The Eye Sees Itself: Dissociation, Enactment, and the Achievement of Conflict*. Contemporary Psychoanalysis 40:197-237
- Unformulated conflict between good-me and bad-me is dissociated in what I have elsewhere called the “weak” sense, while unformulated conflict between me and not-me is dissociated in the “strong” sense (Stern, 1997, accepted).
- Because the next moment is unformulated, it may be shaped in many different ways—but not in just any ways at all.
- (1983). Unformulated experience. Contemp.
- (1989), The analyst's unformulated experience of the patient. Contemp.
- (1997), Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis.
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Stern, D. B. (2005) An Interpersonal/Relational View of Robert Grossmark's “The Case of Peter”. Contemporary Psychoanalysis 41:117-126
- Stern 24 East 82nd Street New York NY 10028 sternhift@aol.com enactmentdissociationtraumaauthenticityunformulatedinterpersonalrelational The case of Peter is discussed from an interpersonal/relational perspective emphasizing dissociation, enactment, and the emergence of authentic psychoanalytic responsiveness from unformulated experience.
- Much of what is most important about the analyst's experience of the patient, and the patient's experience of the analyst, remains unformulated—thoughts, affects, perceptions, and so on. Unformulated experience should not necessarily be articulated.
- I like to think of the range of unformulated experience—that is, the range of all the meanings we might articulate—as the volume of space inside some immense building, an airplane hangar, for instance.
- That is one of the important things about conceptualizing the unconscious as unformulated experience: The formulation of the unformulated requires us to select just one of a number of alternative meanings.
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