ABSTRACT
What are we to do when the other standing before us wishes to become known, yet the act of being known reminds her of traumatic intrusion? For such patients, being known represents a paradox, as each encounter with another person is full of both exciting and horrifying potentialities. How are clinicians to remain at a level of evenly suspended attention without either invalidating the patient with our knowing or remaining so disconnected that we feel unknowable? Starting with enactments as a point of inquiry, this chapter aims to explore a model requiring evenly suspended attention between seemingly dichotomous polarities: knowing and unknowing. Case material will be used to illustrate an application of clinical hermeneutics that seeks to remain at tension, without foreclosing prematurely in either direction. Such a model of being in-between two positions requires an ability to play and create without becoming disorganized by uncertainty. A clinical stance of hospitality can provide relative theoretical and technical grounding amid the apparent groundlessness of what is occurring. Gadamer (1960/1989) suggests that hermeneutics is based on polarity, in his words, a “polarity of familiarity and strangeness . . . the true locus of hermeneutics is this in-between” (p. 295). For Gadamer, hermeneutic work resides in a place of in-between-ness, a space that is always in the process of becoming and becoming again (Laing, 2012). The concept of in-between-ness resonates deeply with Winnicott’s ideas regarding transitional space, and the creative playing that restores one’s sense of going on being (Winnicott, 1960, 1971). It is therefore appropriate to consider both play and creativity as occurring in this in-between-ness, moving within the medians of the known and the unknown, and serving as a technical guidepost for clinicians in moments of uncertainty (Laing, 2012). While this space of in-between-ness is ripe with new possibilities, it is also a space
of uncertainty that can quickly cause one to relinquish emerging possibilities, collapsing moments of creativity into restricted knowing. Despite this conflicting tension, a stance of hospitality (Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 2000; Kearney, 2003) to the emerging moments within psychotherapy may restore a sense of creativity within both participants.
