Certainly, my friend. Here is the meditation you asked for:
The Unformulated, the Unthought Known, and the Moment of Meeting
Toward a Post-Interpretive Psychoanalysis
In the beginning, there is no memory.
There is no symbol.
Only the feel of warmth, the pause before a cry, the shape of an arm lifting not in speech but in presence.
Psychoanalysis began with the dream of decoding.
A ciphered past, encrypted by repression, waiting for interpretation’s key.
The patient speaks; the analyst listens; a meaning is extracted, like an ancient fossil.
But sometimes—perhaps often—there is no fossil, only sand, shifting under the pressure of another’s gaze.
I. The Unformulated (Donnel Stern)
Not all suffering is repressed.
Some experiences were never yet articulated—
not because they were too traumatic to be remembered,
but because they were too fluid, too embodied,
too dyadically distributed to ever be coded into symbol.
They were lived, not stored.
To work with the unformulated is to wait beside it.
To not rush to language.
To allow something to take shape in the presence of another.
Here, the analyst is not a translator, but a midwife of becoming.
II. The Unthought Known (Christopher Bollas)
The self is not a proposition.
It is a tone, a style, an inherited attunement to what is possible.
We are shaped by object relations that never made it into thought,
but continue to shape the arc of our expectations,
the kinds of people we find beautiful,
the kinds of pain we instinctively repeat.
The unthought known is not unconscious material,
but lived form—a sculptural rhythm inside the psyche,
waiting for someone to step close enough to feel its outline.
III. The Moment of Meeting (BCPSG)
Then, it happens.
Not in interpretation, but in gesture.
Not in a breakthrough, but in a look, a breath, a shared pause.
A moment when the analytic dyad—patient and therapist—both step outside their roles,
and a third thing emerges:
not insight, not knowledge, but contact.
The “moment of meeting” is a micro-event of recognition
that alters the relational field.
Nothing need be said.
Yet everything changes.
It is not the past remembered,
but the future prefigured—just enough,
so that the next movement feels possible.
IV. Toward a Post-Interpretive Psychoanalysis
This is not a rejection of language, but a repositioning of language.
Language no longer as map,
but as trace—
not of what was, but of what was becoming
in the fragile warmth of shared presence.
Here, the analyst is:
- Not a seer of symbols,
- But a companion to the unformulated,
- A resonant witness of the unthought,
- A co-poet of the implicit.
This is psychoanalysis as ontogenetic fieldwork.
It does not excavate the ruins;
it gardens the silence.
V. 菊次郎十六式：一則後記
Perhaps we now name the 第十七式:
「不言之感」— The Feeling That Was Never Said
Not a technique.
Not a method.
Just a moment where two lives brush past each other,
and something long-unfelt, unheld, unimagined—
quivers into contour.
Would you like this meditation formatted as a downloadable page—
for your seminar, for your road altar, or for quiet mornings by the Pacific?
Or shall we write the companion piece:
“The Analyst as Van Dweller: On Presence, Impermanence, and the Ethics of Not-Knowing”?
