Commentary

The wiser a paper, the more difficult its challenges. Academic bickering finds scant place, and parallel lines of thought must earn their relevance.

Warren Poland's Toronto address is, I think, wise in keeping close to clinical facts and processes. Its clarity and remarkable freedom from theoretical jargon help to convey his views across conceptual chasms, as does its highlighting of a core analytic function, that of being witness to the analysand's ongoing psychic productions. What, then, can stand as comment? After addressing the patient's “testimony,” I shall delve, at my peril, into the topic of metapsychological frameworks and their consequences.

The patient's evolving “testimony” conveys and advances personal “truths” not consciously known. The term truths here, though, must be taken with a grain of salt: regarded as certainties, they may at second look reveal themselves as half-truths, if not outright misconceptions. Recourse can be made here to Bertrand Russell's distinction between “knowledge by acquaintance” (1911, 1948), which may be extended to include what the analysand unconsciously “knows” well enough to strenuously unknow it, and an “ostensive knowledge,” what can be pointed to and turned fully conscious. I trust that Poland agrees the analysand unknows core aspects of a “testimony” that at its most recondite he mainly enacts, and that such testimony entangles the analyst, by action and by the perlocutionary uses of language, its “emotive” and “actional” effects on the listener. The analyst, when on his or her game, can provide a conjectural version of what Russell calls “knowledge by description” of what is going on in the consulting room.

Freud taught us that this elicits resistance on both sides. The patient “knows” too much, has learned how to unknow it, and defends this unknowing; the patient's testimony protagonizes it, in an attempt to enlist the analyst in buttressing defenses against evidence that might