Routledge Knowing, Not-Knowing and Sort-of-Knowing: Psychoanalysis and the Experience of Uncertainty

Product Description A contemporary, wide-ranging exploration of one of the most provocative topics currently under psychoanalytic investigation: the relationship of dissociation to varieties of knowing and unknowing. The twenty-eight essays collected here invite readers to reflect upon the ways the mind is structured around and through knowing, not-knowing, and sort-of-knowing or uncertainty. The authors explore the ramifications of being up against the limits of what they can know as through their clinical practice, and theoretical considerations, they simultaneously attempt to open up psychic and physical experience. How, they ask, do we tolerate ambiguity and blind spots as we try to know? And how do we make all of this useful to our patients and ourselves? The authors approach these and similar epistemological questions through an impressively wide variety of clinical dilemmas (e.g., the impact of new technologies upon the analytic dyad) and theoretical specialties (e.g., neurobiology). Review "Don't miss this marvelous collection of articles, the record of one of the most scintillating psychoanalytic conferences I can ever remember attending. It's a real knockout--brilliantly conceived and masterfully realized. Virtually everyone you might expect to be included in a project called Knowing, Not-Knowing, and Sort-of Knowing is included, and then some, and the result is a volume of breadth and depth that will be read for decades."--Donnel B. Stern, PhD "This is a brave book and an important one. It is timely too. The interest in the ordinariness of dissociative states of mind and its place in all of our psyches, not just the traumatic, is allowing our field to question the historical grip that psychoanalysis has had on the need to know, the need to be right, the need to offer the correct interpretation. In short, the need to find certainty. Psychoanalysis is now such a developing praxis that we can come to humility without fear. We can afford to address questions of 'knowing' and 'not-knowing', and even 'maybe knowing', without the edifice crumbling. Indeed, as this important collection of papers shows, it is in the questioning that our understandings and approaches to the mind develop and strengthen. As we open ourselves up to uncertainties, we have the means to offer the mixture of uncertainty and rigor; of knowing and not-knowing; of thinking and rethinking, to the people we see, thus enlivening them, ourselves, and our theories."--Susie Orbach, psychoanalyst and author of Bodies; Co-Founder "What I know is that Knowing, Not-Knowing, and Sort-of Knowing is a book you should read. Jean Petrucelli has collected a large group of jewels and produced a psychoanalytic crown. This cutting-edge collection covers those topics you will most want to know about in today's psychoanalytic world, from dissociation, multiple self-states, neuro-psychoanalysis, affect theory, implicit knowing, and more. It is fitting that such a book ends with essays on joy, as it is a joy to have this collection available."--Lewis Aron, PhD About the Author Jean Petrucelli