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The practice of philosophy, like psychoanalysis or psychotherapy, is a form of conversation. Conversations grow and flourish when we are able to listen and respond openly to what the other, our interlocutor, has to say. On the other hand, conversations quickly bog down and
come to an end when we insist on the rightness of a particular belief or value. To truly converse is to enter into a relationship with another (person) without knowing in advance where this will take us. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1991) famously stated:
A genuine conversation is never the one that we wanted to conduct. Rather, it is generally more correct to say that we fall into conversation, or even that we become involved in it. The way one word follows another, with the conversation taking its own twists and reaching its own conclusion, may well be conducted in some way, but the partners conversing are far less the leaders of it than the led [p. 383].
The conversation, as described by Gadamer (1991), is an apt description not only of the practice of philosophy and psychoanalysis, but of the actual experience of reading Donna Orange's splendid new book, Thinking for Clinicians: Philosophical Resources for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Humanistic Psychotherapies. Donna invites us to converse with philosophers and to learn from them. In the process, we gain a new appreciation for the value of theory and the importance of philosophy for our therapeutic work.
Gadamer (1991) additionally suggested that genuine conversation or dialogue always involves “not knowing”: “No one knows in advance what will ‘come out’ of a conversation. … Understanding, or its failure, is like an event that happens to us” (p. 383). For Gadamer, the notion of uncertainty is always inherent in human experience. It is precisely this not knowing, the recognition that the world is greater than we are, and that experience consists of more than we can ever put into words or actions that is crucial to an appreciation of