Against Understanding

• Format Paperback | 264 pages
• Dimensions 159 x 235 x 17.78mm | 386g
• Publication date 20 Nov 2013
• Illustrations note 9 Line drawings, black and white; 1 Tables, black and white; 9 Illustrations, black and white

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….