ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the result of reading the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and finding in his ideas possibilities for clinical psychoanalytic thinking. Patient and analyst work with unbidden perceptions routinely. And though psychoanalysts may sometimes learn about patients in more consciously designed ways, the great proportion of analytic observations, and all the most significant ones, are of the common human variety. To accept the centrality of unbidden observations takes nothing away from the significance of precision, rigor, and curiosity in psychoanalytic inquiry. The chapter takes up the unformulated experience of the patient, describing in more detailed terms the formulation of experience in psychoanalysis. To psychoanalysts, whose work and commitment require constant exposure to the difficulty of self-knowledge, this way of understanding openness is not only fitting but just. But the foundation of psychoanalytic competence is that analysts are relatively free, within the special analytic setting, to allow themselves the unbidden experience that marks the formulation of expectations.
