The Impossibility of Knowing is a book that assembles and integrates Jackie Gerrard's clinical work and thinking over the many years of her working life.

The chapters in Part I focus on patients with specific types of psychopathology and explore particular difficulties in technique and thinking. There are numerous clinical examples from her practice. Above all, she stresses throughout the book the importance of the enquiring mind and the struggle not to 'know' but to be ever ready to 'not know' and to explore--reflected in the title of Chapter 2--'On Travelling Hopefully'....