ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a clinical example to illustrate the analyst coming up against the limits of common sense thinking, even the common sense of received psychoanalytic knowledge. The entire history of psychoanalysis can be seen as one of jump-thoughts, astonishment that accepted wisdom fails us. Freud was particularly adept at this: he used crises to transform painfully won knowledge. The chapter explains that this process is intrinsic to psychoanalytic practice. Sometimes analysts write about their crises, but fall back on received wisdom to resolve them. To watch this process at work is also very instructive. The chapter offers a brief survey of the history of some jump-thoughts and/or the failure to make them. The history of the most important advances in psychoanalytic thought is one of effective seduction into the pleasure of more clinical-theoretical pain.
