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...
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 i...
Against Understanding, Volume 2, casts a spotlight on the status of case studies in psychoanalysis, which are commonly used to illustrate clinicians' expertise and mastery rather than patients' actual itineraries. When a case is presented, the complex, unwieldy, and often self-contradictory material of a therapeutic trajectory is often vastly oversimplified in view of producing a linear narrative that seems perfectly to fit the parameters of a practitioner's preferred theoretical framework. Bruce Fink attempts to eschew the appearance of "mastery" in assembling clinical material and in...
Against Understanding, Volume 2, casts a spotlight on the status of case studies in psychoanalysis, which are commonly used to illustrate clinicians' ...
"The goal of my teaching has always been, and remains, to train analysts." --Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, 209
Arguably the most profound psychoanalytic thinker since Freud, and deeply influential in many fields, Jacques Lacan often seems opaque to those he most wanted to reach. These are the readers Bruce Fink addresses in this clear and practical account of Lacan's highly original approach to therapy. Written by a clinician for clinicians, Fink's Introduction is an invaluable guide to Lacanian psychoanalysis, how it's done, and how it differs from other forms of therapy....
"The goal of my teaching has always been, and remains, to train analysts." --Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, 209
What does Lacan show us? He shows us that desire is not a biological function; that it is not correlated with a natural object; and that its object is fantasized. Because of this, desire is extravagant. It cannot be grasped by those who might try to master it. It plays tricks on them. Yet if it is not recognized, it produces symptoms. In psychoanalysis, the goal is to interpret-that is, to read-the message regarding desire that is harbored within the symptom. Although desire upsets us, it also inspires us to invent artifices that can serve us as a compass. An animal species has a single...
What does Lacan show us? He shows us that desire is not a biological function; that it is not correlated with a natural object; and that its object is...
