In this meditation on psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, and social constructivism, Donnel Stern explores the relationship between two fundamental kinds of experience: explicit verbal reflection and "unformulated experience," or experience we have not yet reflected on and put into words. Stern is especially concerned with the process by which we come to formulate the unformulated.

It is not an instrumental task, he holds, but one that requires openness and curiosity; the result of the process is not accuracy alone, but experience that is deeply felt and fully imagined.

Much of Unformulated Experience concerns the pragmatic clinical consequences of taking to heart his hermeneutic perspective on experience. Stern shows how the unconscious itself can be reconceptualized hermeneutically, and he goes on to explore the implications of this viewpoint for interpretation and countertransference.

A demonstration of the clinical consequentiality of hermeneutic thinking, Unformulated Experience bears out Stern's belief that psychoanalysis is as much about the revelation of the new in experience as it is about the discovery of the old.