Against Understanding, Volume 2 Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key [Paperback]

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 practitioners preferred theoretical framework.

Bruce Finkattempts to eschew the appearance of mastery in assembling clinical material and in discussing his approach to practice and theory in the myriad case histories and vignettes included in both Volumes 1 & 2 of Against Understanding. To counterbalance the kind of paring down of material usually carried out to make cases conform to a particular paradigm, the case write-ups presented here include much of the raw data so often omitted: verbatim quotes from patients about their lives, backgrounds, dreams, and fantasies; and details about the many obscure, vacillating, and unruly phases of treatment. Finkhopes thereby to allow readers to form their own opinions about the well-foundedness or unsoundness of his formulations, interpretations, and interventions.

This second part of a two-volume collection of papers, interviews, and case studies provides the reader with hundreds of illustrations of Lacanian theory in practice, and will be essential for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and counselors.

Contents. Preface. Acknowledgments. Commentary. On Clinical Practice. 1. Analysand and Analyst in the Global Economy, or Why Anyone in their Right Mind Would Pay for an Analysis. 2. Whats So Different about Lacans Approach to Psychoanalysis? 3. Fantasies and the Fundamental Fantasy: An Introduction. 4. The Ethics of Psl“T