Against Understanding, Volume 1

by Bruce Fink

2014 American Board & Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize winner for Best Anthology 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 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 thwart rather than foster 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.

Genres: Psychology, Psychoanalysis

274 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Bruce Fink is a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor. He trained as a psychoanalyst in France for seven years with and is now a member of the psychoanalytic institute Jacques Lacan created shortly before his death, the École de la Cause freudienne in Paris, and obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII (Saint-Denis). He served as Professor of Psychology from 1993 to 2013 at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is currently an affiliated member of the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Center.

Dr. Fink is the author of six books on Lacan (which have been translated into many different languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, German, Polish, Croatian, Greek, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese):
• The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995)
• A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997)
• Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004)
• Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2007)
• Against Understanding: Commentary, Cases, and Critique in a Lacanian Key, 2 volumes (London: Routledge, 2013-2014)

He has translated several of Lacan’s works, including:
• The Seminar, Book XX (1972-1973): Encore, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge (New York: Norton, 1998)
• Écrits: A Selection (New York: Norton, 2002)
• Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English (New York: Norton, 2006), for which he received the 2007 nonfiction translation prize from the French-American Foundation and the Florence Gould Foundation
• On the Names-of-the-Father (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013)
• The Triumph of Religion (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013)
• The Seminar, Book VIII: Transference (Cambridge: Polity Press, forthcoming)

He is also the coeditor of three collections on Lacan’s work published by SUNY Press:
• Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1995)
• Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud (1996)
• Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality (2002)

He has presented his theoretical and clinical work at close to a hundred different conferences, psychoanalytic institutes, and universities in the U.S. and abroad since 1986.

In recent years, he has authored mysteries involving a character based on Jacques Lacan: The Adventures of Inspector Canal (London: Karnac, 2010, and translated into Finnish). A second volume, Death by Analysis, was published by Karnac in 2013, to be followed by two further mysteries in 2014 (The Purloined Love and Odor di Murderer).

Reviews

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 2 out of 5]

The key to reading Lacanian musings is to realize that Lacanians are serious and they mean what they say. By the time I got to the Marilyn Monroe chapter and the author's cocktail party psycho-analysis, I started to realize that there was no way to defend the absurdities the author was preaching. In the TV show I was watching last night (Gilmore Girls season 1 ep 11) they made the same cocktail party analysis concerning Norma Jean and Arthur Mailer as was presented in this book.