Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis (Relational Perspectives Book)

Rating:
Summary: Breathtaking
Review: Stern has created an amazing, breathtaking, thorough, and convincing reinterpretation of the unconscious and the phenomena associated with it. He brings a deeply assimilated knowledge of Gadamer, James, Merleau-Ponty and other hermeneutic and phenomenological thinkers to bear on the perennial problem of unconsciousness. Although the first chapter of this book is a bit turgid, Stern soon gets in his groove and before one knows it is radically, joltingly, and astoundingly shifting one's root ways of understanding the unconscious. Stern moves the locus of the psychoanalytic unconscious from the realm of actuality to that of possibility, showing how motivated unconsciousness is not so much the elimination of an actual experience from consciousness as it is the shutting down of particular possibilities of experiencing. Unlike other phenomenological thinkers who have suggested this (May, Boss, etc.) Stern actually works out in a very meticulous and careful way how and why this sort of "shutdown" can happen. He clearly shows how our experience of possibilities is every bit as psychologically important- if not more so- as is our experience of actualities. And when we recognize this, our whole conception of psychoanalysis and the unconscious is turned upside-down! This book is a must read for all those interested in psychology and psychoanalysis. It is able to explain all those nagging, ambiguous, contradictory things about the unconscious that keep you awake late at night.