About the Book
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).
Table of Contents:
Introduction , Stalking the Elusive Mutative Experience , The enigma of the transference , The Keynote Addresses , The nearness of you 1 : Navigating selfhood, otherness, and uncertainty 2 , The unconscious as a knowledge processing centre , Dissociation—Clinical, Diagnostic, and Conceptual Perspectives ... from Murder through Abuse to Masochism , Shooting in the spaces: Violent crime as dissociated enactment 1 , Dissociative identity disorder: The abused child and the spurned diagnosis , Dissociation and dissociative disorders: Commentary and context , Multiple personality disorder and spirit possession: Alike, yet not alike , Masochistic relating, dissociation, and the wish to rescue the loved one: A view from multiple self-state theory , When Experience Has a Mind of Its Own , Things that go bump in the night: Secrets after dark , Psychoanalytic treatment of panic attacks 1 , On getting away with it: On the experiences we don't have , How Do We Know and How Does It Change? The Role of Implicit and Explicit Mind/Brain/Body Processes , The right brain implicit self: A central mechanism of the psychotherapy change process , The uncertainty principle in the psychoanalytic process , Implicit and explicit pathways to psychoanalytic change , Life as performance art: Right and left brain function, implicit knowing, and "felt coherence" , Bridging neurobiology, cognitive science and psychoanalysis: Recent contributions to theories of therapeutic action , How Bodies Are Theorized, Exhibited and Struggled with and against: Gender, Embodiment, and the Analyst's Physical Self , Lights, camera, attachment: Female embodiment as seen through the lens of pornography , Purging as embodiment 1 , The incredible shrinking shrink , I Know Something about You: Working with Extra-Analytic Knowledge in the Analytic Dyad in the Twenty-First Century , I know something about you , Double exposure ... Sightings of the analyst outside the consultation room , Who's afraid of Google? , Six degrees of separation ... When real worlds collide in treatment , Omissions of Joy , Instances of joy in psychoanalysis: Some reflections , The underbelly of joy , The intersubjectivity of joy , The healing power of joy
About the Author :
Jean Petrucelli
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
