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This second collection of Ahumada's papers attracted my attention because it addresses an important challenge facing psychoanalysis today: establishing the epistemic (knowledge-validating) status of our discipline. As one might expect, there is some repetition, and ideas are developed less systematically than would usually be the case in a purpose-written book; however, the author's excellent introduction shows how the papers are related thematically. In defending insight as “psychoanalytic knowing,” Ahumada presents arguments against the linguistic analysis of meaning, the claims of psychoanalytic hermeneutics, and philosophical criticisms of psychoanalysis, as he believes that they constitute the challenges we face. Both in tone and content, his book is a polemic rather than an evenhanded assessment.
In his introduction, Ahumada writes, “This book has two intertwined purposes: first, to enquire on how insight is gained in clinical psychoanalysis and, second, to clarify the epistemic place of psychoanalysis and of its concepts” (p. 1). With respect to how insight is gained, Ahumada contends that verbal interpretations merely convey knowledge of the patient's unconscious by description—a sort of verbal map that is useful only when complemented by the patient's knowledge of it by first-hand acquaintance.
Knowledge of the unconscious by acquaintance, Ahumada states, can be obtained only when the patient actually experiences the analyst as an archaic object belonging to an unconscious relational configuration. By adhering to neutrality and thus neither confirming nor disconfirming the patient's projection of archaic objects, the analyst facilitates the patient's paradoxical awareness of him or her simultaneously “as” and “as not” the archaic object, leading the patient to question and eventually reject the belief that the projection is veridical; that is, to accept its falsification. This is ostensive interpretation, which leads to ostensive insight, ostensive meaning-sh