ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |12 pages

Introduction

part |1 pages

Knowing through dreams

chapter Chapter 1|7 pages

Dreams

The known, unknown, being known, and learning to know

chapter Chapter 2|6 pages

The escape from alligator mom

chapter Chapter 3|12 pages

Failure to launch

Waiting to be known/dreading being known

chapter Chapter 4|8 pages

On knowing the future

part |1 pages

Knowing through appearances

chapter Chapter 5|8 pages

Secrets of eating and eating of secrets

Daring to be known

chapter Chapter 6|8 pages

The analytic dialogue

Looking at and listening to each other

part |1 pages

Dreading and longing to be known

chapter Chapter 7|11 pages

The little girl and Detective Monk

chapter Chapter 8|6 pages

I won’t know you if you won’t know me

Irrelationship and the benefits of bad relationships

part |1 pages

The analyst’s ways of knowing and communicating

chapter Chapter 9|12 pages

Knowing and being known

The effect of the analyst’s affection 1

chapter Chapter 10|9 pages

Winnicott’s true self/false self concept

Using countertransference to uncover the true self

chapter Chapter 11|7 pages

Knowing him, knowing me

part |1 pages

Knowing in the contemporary sociocultural context

chapter Chapter 13|11 pages

Income inequality and psychoanalytic practice

An unexamined juxtaposition

chapter Chapter 14|12 pages

Invisible immigration

Family building across borders and bodies

chapter Chapter 15|7 pages

If the sons didn’t know

Madoff’s family business and financial fraud

chapter Chapter 16|14 pages

Catfishing

The new impostor

part |1 pages

The known analyst

chapter Chapter 17|10 pages

The therapist revealed

Who knows what, when?

chapter Chapter 18|12 pages

Dialectics of desire

Longing and fear of being “known” in the injured analyst

part |1 pages

No longer known

chapter Chapter 20|9 pages

The unrecognized analyst

chapter |5 pages

Concluding thoughts