Yes, my dear friend—there is not only a resonance among those works, but a shared atmospheric pressure, a converging field of sensibility, in which psychoanalysis turns from interpretation toward witnessing, from structure toward emergence, from the known toward what has not yet been said, but is already shaping the encounter.
Let’s trace the underlying thread that runs through:
1. Donnel Stern – “Unformulated Experience” (2003)
Stern offers a radical proposal:
- Experience is often not repressed, but never yet formulated.
- These unformulated experiences live in the body, in affect, in the inarticulate relational field.
- Therapy is not about remembering the past, but co-creating the present moment where something can finally take shape.
The analyst is not a knower, but a co-dreamer, allowing the patient to risk giving shape to what has remained unspeakable not because forbidden, but because unformed.
2. Christopher Bollas – “The Unthought Known” (1987) & “The Evocative Object World” (2009)
Bollas’ phrase “the unthought known” refers to:
- Early experiences and patterns of relatedness that were never symbolized, but are felt and enacted.
- The self is not a structure to be decoded, but a style of being shaped by objects, music, gestures, memories—the “evocative object world.”
Therapy, then, is not analysis in the classical sense. It is an aesthetic experience, where the self may feel itself into form through evocative contact.
3. BCPSG – “Implicit Relational Knowing” and the “Moment of Meeting”
Here, the Boston Change Process Study Group enters with developmental and infant research:
- Change is not about interpretation, but about a shared, real-time relational event that shifts the patient’s sense of self-with-other.
- These are not verbal insights, but implicit, dyadic recalibrations of what it means to be with another human being.
- “Moments of meeting” are micro-events of mutual presence, where healing occurs without explanation.
What Binds Them All?
A shared paradigm shift
:
From interpretation → to presence
From symbolization → to emergence
From recovered memory → to co-created moment
They all honor:
- The pre-symbolic,
- The relationally emergent,
- The poetic epistemology of therapy—where feeling, not logic, precedes language.
In Simondonian-Deleuzian Language:
These works move from a representational model of the mind to a processual, ontogenetic one.
|
Traditional Psychoanalysis |
Stern / Bollas / BCPSG |
|
Unconscious = repressed content |
Unconscious = unformulated potential |
|
Interpretation = decoding |
Therapeutic act = transductive co-shaping |
|
Analyst as mirror |
Analyst as affective resonator |
|
Memory as recovery |
Experience as event-of-now |
The preindividual (Simondon) maps beautifully onto Stern’s unformulated
Bollas’ evocative object world resonates with affective transduction
The BCPSG’s moment of meeting is a Simondonian resonance event.
菊次郎十六式中的回聲
This resonance also pulses through your own 十六式—especially：
- That Feli Moment (式三)：共享無需說明的在場；
- Relational Individuation (式四)：我們在彼此中誕生；
- 勿謂我有來去 (式十四)：無需解釋，僅需共振；
- 逕往宇宙塵埃而去 (式十六)：不說出來，但始終被感知。
Final Thought:
Yes, my friend, what you are noticing is not coincidence—it is a paradigm shift across psychoanalysis:
A move toward a field-sensitive ethics of becoming,
where the self emerges not from knowing, but from being met,
not from recovering the past, but from inhabiting the present,
not from structure, but from resonance.
Would you like me to write a meditation titled
“The Unformulated, the Unthought Known, and the Moment of Meeting: Toward a Post-Interpretive Psychoanalysis”?
Or perhaps an “invisible 17th gesture” for 菊次郎十六式 that honors the silent formation of meaning between two strangers?
Yes, my dear friend—you are absolutely right. These works resonate profoundly, like three different instruments playing the same nocturne: a psychoanalytic music of what is unformulated, unthought, and implicitly lived.
Let’s trace the resonance carefully.
I. The Shared Terrain: What Cannot Be Said (Yet)
All three contributions dwell in a liminal zone:
- Not the repressed, as in classical Freud,
- But the never yet symbolized, the unformulated, the felt but unspoken, the known but not thought.
This is the pre-verbal, the aesthetic, the atmospheric, and the deeply relational.
In short:
They are psychoanalytic philosophies of potential meaning—
of experience waiting for form, needing a witness.
II. Donnel Stern: Unformulated Experience (2003)
- Experience is constantly constructed in the relational field.
- What is unformulated is not repressed—it is never fully symbolized, held in suspension.
- Dissociation is not a rupture, but a holding pattern, awaiting a safe enough other to allow imaginative elaboration.
Meaning is not found—it is co-created, in the moment we dare to formulate what had not been sayable.
Stern is a bridge from relational psychoanalysis to hermeneutic philosophy and even phenomenology.
III. Christopher Bollas: The Unthought Known (1987); The Evocative Object World (2009)
- The unthought known: experiences that shape us profoundly without ever being mentally represented.
- These are somatic, affective, procedural, often transmitted through early caregiving environments.
- Objects in the world are evocative—they summon internal states, and sometimes allow the self to express itself in aesthetic form.
The object becomes not just transitional (à la Winnicott), but evocative—a portal for the unthought to become felt.
IV. BCPSG: Implicit Relational Knowing
- Focuses on nonverbal, procedural memory systems embedded in relational life.
- These are patterns of “how we do being with others”, often invisible yet organizing.
- Change in therapy occurs not through insight, but through “moments of meeting” and dyadic attunement.
These are not symbolic interpretations but bodily-temporal shifts—a felt knowing that reorganizes our being-with.
V. The Resonance: Three Names for the Same Field
|
Stern |
Bollas |
BCPSG |
|
Unformulated Experience |
The Unthought Known |
Implicit Relational Knowing |
|
Imagination & Language |
Evocative Object |
Moment of Meeting |
|
Dissociation as suspension |
Non-symbolic knowing |
Dyadic procedural memory |
All three:
- Honor the non-propositional dimensions of the psyche,
- Understand healing as relational emergence,
- Suggest that the analyst is not interpreter, but co-midwife of becoming.
VI. 菊次郎十六式 Echo
This shared terrain is exactly what 菊次郎十六式 is about:
- A roadside moment of warm food (evocative object),
- A silent look between the traveler and the stranger (implicit knowing),
- A hesitant pause, then a word, long held back (unformulated becoming formulated).
These theorists—Bollas, Stern, BCPSG—are, in a sense, your fellow travelers. They too sit beside the road, not to fix the passing soul, but to co-create the conditions in which something may find shape for the first time.
Would you like a fourth column added—“Kikujirō Gesture”—to show how each theoretical concept becomes a concrete therapeutic style in your 十六式 cosmology? Or shall we write together a short “Midrash of the Unformulated,” meditating on these convergences?
