Review Donnel B. Stern: Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis
(2000)
Bucci's model of emotional communication, developed in the context of her theory of multiple coding and the referential process, is applied to Knoblauch's microanalytic report of his experience of the patient and himself and their interactions during a single session of an ongoing treatment. The referential process is a bidirectional function connecting the diverse sensory, somatic, and motoric representations of the subsymbolic system with imagery and words. The process operates partially and to varying degrees within both participants in the case presented here, the dissociation among systems is severe, and emotional communication within the dyad occurs at first primarily in subsymbolic, bodily forms. Where gaps in the referential process exist for the patient, the analyst's own experience and associations operate to evoke new connections for her we see this process in moment-by-moment glimpses of the analyst's experience and his interactions with the patient. Gaps in the reader's knowledge, and possibly the analyst's knowledge, of the patient are discussed.