Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Knowing and Being Known

Book excerpt: The importance of knowing and being known is at the heart of the human experience and has always been the core of the psychoanalytic enterprise. Freud named his central Oedipal construct after Sophocles’ great play that dramatically encapsulated the desire, difficulty, and dangers involved in knowing and being known. Psychoanalysis’ founder developed a methodology to facilitate unconscious material becoming conscious, that is, making the unknown known to help us better understand ourselves and our relational lives, including psychic trauma, and multigenerational histories. This book will stimulate readers to contemplate knowing and being known from multiple perspectives. It bursts with thought-provoking ideas and intriguing cases illuminated by penetrating reflections from diverse theoretical perspectives. It will sensitize readers to this theme’s omnipresent, varied importance in the clinical setting and throughout life. Accomplished contributors discuss a wide variety of fascinating topics, illustrated by rich clinical material. Their contributions are grouped under these headings: Knowing through dreams; Knowing through appearances; Dreading and longing to be known; The analyst’s ways of knowing and communicating; Knowing in the contemporary sociocultural context; The known analyst; and No longer known. Readers will find each section deeply informative, stimulating thought, insights, and ideas for clinical practice. Psychoanalytic Explorations in Knowing and Being Known will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, clinical social workers, counselors, students in these disciplines, and members of related scholarly communities.