The Infinity of the Unsaid: Unformulated Experience, Language, and the Nonverbal

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, Unformu...