You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Bruce Fink began as an academic psychologist and is today a Lacanian analyst and noted translator of Lacan. His graduate and undergraduate courses on Freud provide some background for this book, indicating as they do that although he is a Lacanian he has wide knowledge and a serious interest when it comes to Freud. Fink's interest in clinical technique that directly impacts the unconscious is demonstrated in his 2010 paper, “Against Understanding: Why Understanding Should Not Be Viewed as an Essential Aim of Psychoanalytic Treatment”: “psychoanalysis clearly aims at the establishment of a new relationship between the ego and the unconscious whereby the ego no longer rejects and represses so many things” (p. 263). In addition, displaying his cultural sophistication and playfulness, Fink writes mystery novels in which the detective is based loosely on Lacan. He brings all these talents together in this introduction to the clinical Freud.
Fink's goals for the book are broader than understanding Freud clinically. The title and the picture on the dust jacket give clues. The book's subtitle is Techniques for Everyday Practice, but the picture is not of Freud's couch and office. The picture, rather, shows the pleasing décor of a contemporary analyst's office, yet with familiar Freudian images: the couch, a chair, a table with an open book. The title and the picture seem to underscore Fink's wish to place us in Freud's shoes in his journey to discover free association and dream analysis to help patients explore their unconscious. He extends Freud's techniques to explore the unconscious by showing how he and Lacan grasp and impact the unconscious so that patients will live more satisfying and meaningful lives. He wants clinicians to have more tools in their toolboxes. As Warren Poland, in “Reading Fiction and the Psychoanalytic Experience: Proust on Reading and on Reading Proust” (2003), points out, a book can change the reader. Fink challenges the reader to change like Freud