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.
The title Knowing What Psychoanalysts Do and Doing What Psychoanalysts Know includes the grammatically ambiguous “doing” and “knowing” – are they gerunds or present participles – but regardless of the correct categorisation, these verb-nouns attempt to capture and name the action of psychoanalysts and their relationship to praxis and knowledge. The title resonates with the ambiguous grammar of psychoanalysis itself, residing in the tension between broadly defined science and art. The study described in this volume foregrounds the complexity of our discipline and the two-way relationship between theoretical knowledge and praxis. Central in the story of this relationship is the concept of the unconscious, always challenging and unseating what we believe we know. How do we describe psychoanalytic practice and remain faithful to the enormity of the implications of the notion of the unconscious?
Situated in the German idealist tradition, psychoanalysis shares epistemological commitments that data is selected, and explanations constructed, according to unacknowledged and implicit values and assumptions. As Tuckett et al. remind us, Freud’s concept of knowledge went “beyond the usual, empirical-positivist concepts in cognitive science” (118). Given their impressively demonstrated commitment to Freud scholarship in this volume, their investigation is complex and ambitious. Knowing What Psychoanalysts Do and Doing What Psychoanalysts Know explores two central questions: (1) what psychoanalysts know, which implicates epistemological questions about how we can know; and (2) knowing about the activities/actions a psychoanalyst engages in when they do psychoanalysis – that is, what they do with what they know.
These questions are complicated by the understanding that psychoanalytic concepts are elastic and that clinicians inevitably hold implicit and private formulations that contrast with their public and explicit theories (see Sandler 1983). For example, we are all familiar with