Fink - Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key

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 understandingon the patients part as well as on the clinician'sis excessive insofar as the most essential aim of psychoanalytic treatment is change.

Using numerous case studies and clinical vignettes, Fink illustrates that the ability of clinicians to detect the unconscious through slips of the tongue, slurred speech, mixed metaphors, and other instances of misspeaking is compromised by an emphasis on understanding the why and wherefore of patients symptoms and behavior patterns. He shows that the dogged search for conscious knowledge about those 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.

In this first part of a two-volume collection of papers, many of which have never before appeared in print, Bruce Fink provides ample evidence of the curative powers of speech that operate without the need for any sort of explicit, articulated knowledge. Against Understanding, Volume 1 brings Lacanian theory alive in a way that is unique, demonstrating the therapeutic force of a technique that relies far more on the virtues of speech in the analytic setting than on a conscious realization about anything whatsoever on patients parts. This volume will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and counselors.

Bruce Fink is a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He trained as a psychoanalyst in France for seven years withand is now a member ofthe psychoanalytic institute Lacan created shortly before his death, the cole de la Cause Freudienne in Paris. He is also an affiliated member of the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.

AGAINST
UNDERSTANDING,
VOLUME 1

Commentary and Critique
in a Lacanian Key

Bruce Fink

First published 2014
by Routledge
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2014 Bruce Fink

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Fink, Bruce, 1956
Against understanding: commentary, cases and critique in a Lacanian key/authored by Bruce Fink.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Comprehension. 2. Psychology. I. Title.

ISBN: 9780415635424 (hbk)
ISBN: 9780415635431 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781315889641 (ebk)

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TO HLOSE

The analyst must know that his occupying the correct position is not contingent on the criterion that he understand or not understand.

It is not absolutely essential that he understand. I would even say that, up to a certain point, his lack of comprehension can be preferable to an overly great confidence in his understanding. In other words, he must always call into question what he understands and remind himself that what he is trying to attain is precisely what in theory he does not understand. It is certainly only insofar as he knows what desire is, but does not know what the particular subject with whom he is engaged in the analytic adventure desires, that he is well situated to contain within himself the object of that desire.

Lacan, 2001a, p. 234

Psychoanalysis is a field in which we can afford neither to understand nor not to. Thinking too quickly that we understand leads us to misunderstand our patients, whereas manifesting a total lack of understanding gives the impression that we are dense, slow on the uptake, orworse stillnot really listening.

Believing we have understood what is going on for our patients inclines us to overlook the almost fractal nature of human experience, in which ever-finer smaller substructures lurk behind larger, more visible ones. But if we are convinced we have grasped absolutely nothing, we will fail to highlight potentially crucial statements and intervene at significant moments in the treatment.

Psychoanalysts must thus muddle through in a murky, middle ground. We must constantly keep in check the all-too-human tendency to jump to conclusionsto think, or indeed wish, we have comprehended the crux of a theoretical or clinical problemwhile constructing a flexible theoretical and clinical model that can guide our thinking and praxis without freezing it into a routinized, manualized treatment protocol.

Such is, I would suggest, the challenge facing psychoanalyststo navigate between the Charybdis of believing we have grasped everything and the Scylla of being convinced we have grasped nothing. But much the same challenge faces analysands, the people who are undergoing psychoanalysis with us. Like us, they are ineluctably inclined to jump to conclusions, hoping to find quick and easy answers that will bring change and provide relief, but they are forced to realize in the course of analytic treatment that things are virtually always far more complicated than they initially seem. Life is multileveled and virtually every facet of it is overdetermined.

Can analysands be content with inescapably partial, provisional solutions? Will they come to the point of accepting that some formulations may just have to be deemed good enough at certain points in time?

These questions point to a rather curious feature of understanding: understanding satisfies. This may sound appealing on the face of it, but in psychoanalysis we are required to ask: Who or what does it satisfy? If it satisfies the analysands ego, we must be suspicious of the understanding in question, as it is likely to present a flattering picture of the selfin other words, the understanding arrived at is all too convenient. And if it satisfies the analyst, is it because it gives the analyst a gratifying sense of accomplishment, intelligence, or even mastery? If so, its importance must be impugned, it being preferable for the analyst to be surprised or taken off guard by a patients enunciations. Better for the analyst to marvel at the ever-infinite variety of human experience and articulation, and to delight in the unexpected character of the patients formulations.