What do You Know?

The effects of psychoanalysis can be registered in the realm of knowledge, but they are less about knowledge gained than they are about a change in the way of knowing. The direct imparting of knowledge from the analyst to the analysand has long been recognized as a useless gesture in terms of clinical effects. Indeed, even the knowledge gained by the analysand's painstaking discovery, recollecting and remembering, plays only a small part in the benefits of psychoanalytic work. The benefit comes instead through finding a new way of knowing, already generally familiar to the analyst and gradually discovered by the analysand, always in unique and particular ways. This distinct form of knowing is at the core of the psychoanalytic act and at the heart of what psychoanalysis has contributed to clinical science and to culture in general.

It is a knowing how rather than a knowing that. The particular know-how that develops in a successful psychoanalytic treatment, with its deeply affective and imaginative character, is a fundamental and defining feature of clinical psychoanalysis. In fact, psychoanalysis has never been simply about the removal of symptoms or the reduction of neurotic suffering, but rather about the development of a psychic resource for life after the treatment. Since the transmission of this personal know-how is the effect of a successful treatment, articulating the qualities