ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the role of understanding oneself 'from the outside in', looking at how one's actions in the world lead to consequences that in turn maintain or reshape the very nature of the inner world. Manifest behavior has been viewed as a surface phenomenon, something more suited to the focus of social psychology than to the deeper concerns of psychoanalysis about what underlies that behavior. Thus, self-knowledge is typically pursued from the inside out. In distinguishing between knowing oneself from the inside out and knowing oneself from the outside in, author using a terminology that might readily be confused with that used by Bromberg in an important paper on 'knowing one's patient inside out'. The chapter aims of the clinical examples presented, to call our attention to this gap and to offer a theoretical perspective, uniting traditional psychoanalytic ideas with an emphasis on consequential action that has been largely absent from psychoanalytic discourse.
