2014 American Board & Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize winner for Best Anthology, Against Understanding, Volume 1, explores how the process of understanding, which can be seen to be part and parcel of the Lacanian dimension of the imaginary, reduces the unfamiliar to the familiar, transforms the radically other into the same, and renders practitioners deaf to what is actually being said in the analytic setting. Running counter to the received view in virtually all of contemporary psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, Bruce Fink argues that the current obsession with understanding – on the patient’s part as well as on the clinician’s – is excessive insofar as the most essential aim of psychoanalytic treatment is change.
Key Features
- Illustrates the curative powers of speech that operate without the need for explicit knowledge.
- Includes numerous case studies and clinical vignettes.
- Demonstrates the therapeutic force of a technique that relies on the virtues of speech in the analytic setting.
Additional Information
Fink shows that the dogged search for conscious knowledge about symptoms and patterns, by patients and practitioners alike, often thwarts rather than fosters change, which requires ongoing access to the unconscious and extensive work with it. This first part of a two-volume collection of papers includes many that have never before appeared in print. This volume will be of interest to psychoanalysts.
