The Infinity of the Unsaid

Unformulated Experience, Language, and the Nonverbal

Donnel B. Stern

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138604995
• eBook ISBN: 9780429886560
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The theory of unformulated experience is an interpersonal/relational conception of unconscious process. The idea is that unconscious content is not fully formed, merely awaiting discovery, but is instead better understood as potential experience—a vaguely organized, primitive, global, non-ideational, affective state.

In the past, the formulation of experience was most commonly understood as verbal articulation. That was the perspective Donnel B. Stern took in 1997 in his first book, Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis. In this new book, Stern recognizes that we need to theorize the formulation of nonverbal experience, as well. Using new concepts of the "acceptance" and "use" of experience that "feels like me," Stern argues for a wider conception of "meaningfulness." Some formulated experience is verbal ("articulation"), but other formulations are nonverbal ("realization"). Demonstrating how this can be so is at the heart of this book. Stern then goes on to house this entire set of ideas in the commodious conception of language offered by Charles Taylor, Gadamer, and Merleau-Ponty.

The Infinity of the Unsaid offers an expansion of the theory of unformulated experience that has important implications for clinical thinking and practice; it will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists across all schools of thought.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Meaningfulness: more than just words

The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit attention of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962), p. xx

I undertook this revision and elaboration of the theory of unformulated experience (Stern, 1983, 1997, 2010a, 2015) to take account of the role of nonverbal experience more explicitly and thoroughly than my earlier writings have done. A second goal was to reconsider, through the lens of hermeneutics, the relation of the verbal and the nonverbal in psychoanalysis. Through that lens, the verbal and the nonverbal have more in common than they do in the information processing metaphor that has been so influential in cognitive psychology, and to some extent within psychoanalysis, over the last decades.

The book has been a long time coming. The first draft was written in 2007–2008, as the second half of another book, Partners in Thought: Working with Unformulated Experience, Dissociation, and Enactment (Stern, 2010a), that was eventually published without it—although I did promise in the beginning of that book to come back to the themes taken up here. This book is the fulfillment of that promise.

I set the chapters aside at that time, though, and although I always meant to come back to them, other matters attracted my attention, and it has taken this long to return to them. (A third book, Relational Freedom: Emergent Properties of the Interpersonal Field [Stern, 2015], intervened.) I have revised, updated, and elaborated the original chapters in many significant respects, but the bones of the project remain what they were ten years ago. The reason this material languished certainly has nothing to do with the significance it holds for me: these ideas have been in the center of my interest since I began writing in the field of psychoanalysis.

In this introductory chapter, I lay out the argument of the book and the plan of the chapters, and situate that argument within certain relevant and growing parts of the psychoanalytic literature (the study of procedural meaning, and the broader subject of unrepresented states); but first, as the context within which the expansion and revision offered in the following chapters find their meaning, I offer a summary of the theory of unformulated experience as it has existed up to this point.

A brief summary of the theory of unformulated experience

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I began to give shape to my thoughts about the unconscious, I found great value in Harry Stack Sullivan’s (1940/1953, 1953) developmental theory of cognition. Sullivan proposed three modes of thought and experience, each of which he conceptualized to be more “mature” than the one that came before it; and like the developmental conceptions of a number of other theorists (Bion’s reworking of Klein’s paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, for instance), Sullivan’s idea was that each of these cognitive stages was also preserved, as life went on, as one of several ways of organizing experience. Prototaxis, the most primitive mode, bears some similarity to the “blooming, buzzing confusion” that William James (1890, p. 462) imagined was the state of mind of the youngest infants. Everything is all mixed up together in something like a primordial, cognitive/affective soup. There is no before and after, no differentiation of one thing from another. Sullivan thought prototaxis was rarely observed after infancy, except in psychotic states. We might compare prototaxis to Freud’s (1914b) primary narcissism, Loewald’s (1978/2000) primary unity, or Matte-Blanco’s (1988) indivisible mode of being.

It was Sullivan’s (1940/1953, 1953) next two modes of experience, the parataxic and the syntaxic, that interested me most. In parataxis, experience does have a before and after, but the meanings of this experience cannot be specified. The meanings are what Sullivan described as “private” or “autistic.” This is a profound kind of privacy, because the meanings are private even to oneself. That is, one cannot articulate the meanings, even in one’s own mind. For all intents and purposes, then, parataxis is Sullivan’s way of conceptualizing unconscious meaning. But, as we shall see, this conceptualization differs from Freud’s in important respects.

For Sullivan (1940/1953, 1953), parataxic experience is the form in which the hidden meanings of interpersonal relations exist. Sullivan did not use the term “transference.” He preferred “parataxic distortion,” by which he meant the attribution of meanings in the here-and-now to another person, meanings that cannot be specified and that are, in fact, not even suspected by the person who creates them. Sullivan created this neologism for the reason he usually had when he invented words, which he did frequently: he wanted to mark the differentiation of his own ideas from traditional psychoanalytic conceptions.

Let me explain the substance of the differentiation in this case. Sullivan (1940, 1953) did not accept the Freudian view that interpersonal life is a compromise expression of the conflict between drive and defense. Even more important to his understanding of the unconscious parts of relatedness was his emphasis on transference as the unconscious aspect of present-day relatedness—in contrast to Freud, whose theory of transference emphasized historical antecedents. It is not that Sullivan ignored history. Quite the contrary. He was insistent on the significance of interpersonal history, especially with the significant people of early life. But his clinical interest in interpersonal relations—that is, in the observable aspects of interaction in the here-and-now—led him to take the position that clinicians’ efforts should not be directed at the interpretation of the past, but instead at the observation and description to the patient of the present-day outcomes of those historical events. How does the dissociation of aspects of interpersonal life, whenever they began, affect interpersonal relations now? What is distorted, obscured or “mystified” (Levenson, 1972/2005, 1983/2005) in interpersonal life now, and why? Sullivan certainly agreed that the clinician must learn what happened in early, important relationships; but therapeutic action, for him, emerges not from the recall or reconstruction of that history, as Freud and the Freudians of Sullivan’s day claimed, but from a clinical focus on the present-day outcomes of those events. Sullivan wanted to encourage the formulation of distortions in current relationships, including the therapeutic one, on the basis of whatever the patient’s interpersonal history had been; but he did not believe that reconstructing the patient’s history, in and of itself, led to change. This position made good sense to me, and I embraced it.

It is only with the syntaxic mode of experience, though, the most “mature” form of experience in Sullivan’s scheme of things, that we arrive at the idea that most deeply inspired the concept of unformulated experience. The syntaxic mode is consensually validated experience— experience that is either explicitly public, or could be public if one chose to make it so. “Public” in this sense is not limited to the expression to another person of knowledge about one’s experience; for experience to become “public” is also for the meanings of one’s own experience to become knowable to oneself. That is, one can reflect on one’s own experience only to the extent that the experience is organized in the syntaxic mode. The conversion of meaning from parataxic to syntaxic is therefore analogous to the move from unconscious to preconscious. In the case of parataxic distortion, to convert parataxis into syntaxis is to become aware of the previously unformulated meanings of the relatedness between oneself and the other.

One of the keys to this set of ideas is Sullivan’s idea of consensual validation, which is the means by which parataxis becomes public and enters the syntaxic mode. Consensual validation is defined by Sullivan as knowing in the special way that verbal language allows. For experience to be “public” is for it to be represented in language, or capable of being represented in language (that is, one could put it into words if one had a reason to do so).

Why did Sullivan feel that he was presenting a new perspective on these questions? After all, Freud (1915b) too gave language a special place in his theory. For meanings to move from the unconscious to the preconscious, they needed to become attached to words. We could never actually create a direct understanding of unconscious contents, which Freud described as “thing-presentations.” Rather, thing-presentations needed to be connected to language, becoming “word-presentations”; in the process, they were cathected by the preconscious and could then enter awareness.

At a certain point in the development of his argument about things such as this, Sullivan, referring to the link between self-awareness and language, wrote two sentences that had a great impact on me. These two sentences catalyzed much of the reading and thinking I had been doing about the emergent aspects of experiencing.¹ Things began to fall together in my mind. It was suddenly clear to me that verbal language had a different kind of significance in Sullivan’s theory than it did in Freud’s. Here are the sentences, which I first quoted in reference to unformulated experience in 1983:

One has information about one’s experience only to the extent that one has tended to communicate it to another or thought about it in the manner of communicative speech. Much of that which is ordinarily said to be repressed is merely unformulated.

(Sullivan, 1940/1953, p. 185; italics from the original)

It took me years to work out what this meant. I think that even Sullivan, who was onto something very interesting here, did not grasp the implications of his own views. He was implicitly taking issue with a concept that lay at the heart of the Freudian enterprise: the substantive unconscious, the understanding of the unconscious as a container of fully formed unconscious contents, or what Klein later described as unconscious phantasies, the nature of which were largely responsible for how meanings became articulated in consciousness. In this brief passage Sullivan was implying, it seemed to me then (and does still), that for psychic contents to be unconscious was for them to be without explicit meaning in any part of the mind. Unconscious states of mind for him, I thought, were not hard-edged, fully formed bearers of meaning; they were not unconscious phantasies. They were instead vague, potential meanings, not yet fully shaped or articulated. Experience in the parataxic mode, I thought, was experience that had not yet been formulated. That is what I took Sullivan to be suggesting, without actually saying it, when he used that evocative word, that word that struck me so forcefully: “unformulated.”²

I can’t be sure that Sullivan intended to say all of what I took him to mean. Whether he did or not, though, what he said in those lines was a source of inspiration to me. For me, he was saying that it was only as psychic contents were converted from parataxis to syntaxis—from pre-linguistic, autistic form into language—that explicit meaning was created. Furthermore, the meaning created in the syntaxic mode did not exist before, at least not in any explicit form; that meaning was created, for the first time, as it was formulated. This stance, I saw right away, implied that language is not just a set of labels; it has what the philosophical literature taught me to call “constitutive properties.” (Much more about this point in each of the following chapters.) That is, language is not only a medium for the representation of meaning that already exists; it also actually participates in the creation of meaning. The nature of our thoughts or experiences—whatever one wants to call the products of the activities of the mind—are deeply influenced by language. Here is how I made this point in 1997:

The unformulated is not yet knowable in the separate and definable terms of language. Unformulated material is composed of vague tendencies; if allowed to develop to the point at which they can be shaped and articulated, these become the more lucid kind of reflective experience we associate with mutually comprehended verbal articulation.

(Stern, 1997, pp. 37–38)

One of the most interesting and significant things that constitutive theories of language suggested to me was a contrast with those theories, like Freud’s, in which language is understood as a mere label for meanings that already exist. For Freud (1915b), language is inadequate to unconscious meaning (“thing-presentations”), which are only one step removed from things-in-themselves. Unconscious meanings, that is, cannot be accommodated by words. There is a loss of meaning when “thingpresentations” are linked to language, thereby becoming “wordpresentations.” Word-presentations, the only form in which meaning can enter consciousness, are a paler version than the form they represent. Language, that is, inevitably presents an impoverished rendition of the nonverbal meanings that it labels. In today’s world we see this view of language in the work of (for instance) Daniel Stern (1985; Stern, et al, 1998), Wilma Bucci (1997), and Antonio Damasio (1999).

The constitutive theories of language that are discussed in the chapters to come (e.g., Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962; Gadamer, 1965/2004; Taylor, 2016) do not portray linguistic representation this way. In these views, the use of language not only does not inevitably sacrifice meaning; language actually contributes to meanings. Language gives form to these meanings, allowing us to create meanings that would never come into being without it.

In Freud’s work, then, and in theories that treat language in the same way, meaning becomes less itself as it moves from unconsciousness to consciousness. The unconscious meaning is the “truer” or more complete form. In the way I put it above, consciousness is the paler form, a dilution of the meaning that exists in the unconscious. But the situation is different in constitutive theories of language. In these theories, which are the accounts of language I have always tapped in writing about unformulated experience (Stern, 1983, 1997), meaning becomes more itself as it moves from unconsciousness to consciousness. The linguistic expression may very well be the more vivid form of the meaning.

We can go further: we can say that, until the situation is right for meaning to become more itself in the special way that language allows, it remains unformulated. The act of formulation, that is, takes place only when meaning is “ready” to become more than it has been; and to be ready it must percolate for as long as it takes. As I wrote in 1983:

It is not as if the unformulated is leaning against the door, just waiting for a chance to overcome resistance and tumble into the room. The unformulated must organize itself first. It must begin to coalesce.… It must send up tendrils, or feelings of tendency.

(p. 87)

And then, when the interpersonal field is configured in a way that allows it, a fully formed meaning can emerge. Clinical psychoanalysis is devoted to the recognition and encouragement of such opportunities.

Wiggle room and the constraints of reality

The vague, potential tendencies that make up unformulated experience, though, would be no more than conventional stages in the development of a thought or a feeling if the outcome—that is, the eventual form of the articulated experience—were predetermined. In other words, if unformulated experience were “pre-set” to unfold into particular articulated, conscious meanings, just as seeds are “pre-set” to develop into particular plants, then the theory of unformulated experience would be nothing more than a description of how a thoroughly predictable thought comes about. The theory would be merely a history of the predetermined unfolding of thought.

But human life doesn’t feel this way. One of the most compelling and mysterious aspects of our experience is its emergent, unbidden quality (Stern, 1990, 2015). We have no idea what we are going to think or feel next. We are observers of our own continuous acts of psychic creation, and these acts of our minds have an undeniable spontaneity. We do not know, and cannot know, that our sense of spontaneity is “true” (that is, we cannot know for sure that we are right to accept the impression that experience really is emergent)—because we are locked out of the nonconscious parts of the operations of our own minds. It is at least hypothetically possible that our sense of spontaneity—that emergent, antic, unbidden quality that our experience has—is illusory, and that if we knew the invisible workings of our minds we would see that every thought and feeling is predetermined.

But that seems highly unlikely. Such a characterization contradicts not only our sense of ourselves, but also denies the significance of context. Can it be that, without being affected by context, our experience just unfolds from within, like widgets be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction. Meaningfulness: more than just words
• 2 Articulation: the formulation of verbal-reflective meaning
• 3 Realization: the formulation of nonverbal meaning
• 4 Manifestation: the underlying unity of verbal and nonverbal meaning
• Appendix: A comparison of the roles of the verbal and the nonverbal in the theory of unformulated experience and the work of The Boston Change Process Study Group
• References
• Index