What does “unconscious” mean? Unformulated experience and the interpersonal field

Abstract

The occasion of delivering a plenary presentation at the annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association offered me the opportunity to make a summary statement of my lifelong work on the theory of unformulated experience and the interpersonal field. The first half of this paper presents the original form of the theory. The second half introduces changes made in recent years, as the focus of the theory shifted from the place in psychoanalytic treatment of reflection in verbal language to the consideration of the nonverbal, and the expansion or transformation of being. I now contend that to know oneself more deeply is more often a manifestation of growth than the cause of it: the transformation of the one who knows must precede new understanding. It is the transformation that makes possible the knowing. The influences responsible for transformation are much more likely to be relational analytic events—shifts in the interpersonal field—than we used to think. The centrality of language in the older theory, which might appear to have been diminished by the emphasis on the nonverbal in the newer account, is preserved by the expressivist (Charles Taylor) account of language.