Knowing, Not-Knowing, and Sort-of-Knowing: Psychoanalysis and the Experience of Uncertainty. Edited by Jean Petrucelli. London:  Karnac, 2010.  384 pp.

All humans by nature desire to know, as Aristotle famously stated at the beginning of the Metaphysics;1 as analysts, we also know that we naturally desire not to know many things and, for added spice, to sort-of-know many more. Sort-of-knowing, the climactic third term of this volume's title, is appropriately ambiguous. It can mean, as I think is intended, to know something in a partial way: as an intermediate state between knowing

and not. It can also mean, less obviously and focusing on sort of, to know something in a particular manner: in philosophical vernacular, to know something under a description.

There may be several sorts of knowing some one thing, several descriptions—perhaps depending on who is doing the knowing, or where or when. In this edited book of conference proceedings, multiple authors collect descriptions of topics such as dissociation, neuroscience, the body, and joy. In so doing these writers also collectively offer a description of psychoanalysis focused on contemporary views of dissociation.

There is a lot in this volume, so I will begin with an outline. The book is a collection of papers from the 2008 American Psychological Association's Division 39 conference, of the same title, which was cochaired by Jean Petrucelli and Melinda Gellman, and subsequently edited by Petrucelli. It comprises twenty-seven fairly short papers (most of ten to twenty pages) distributed among eight sections. The first two sections are the most brief. Part 1 contains just one paper, by Edgar Levenson, while part 2 contains the two keynote addresses of the conference, by Philip Bromberg on dissociation and Arnold Modell on the unconscious.

Part 3 is made up of five chapters on the subject of dissociation, with three focused more tightly on multiple personality disorder/dissociative identity disorder. Part 4, “When Experience Has a Mind of Its Own,” contains three interesting, loo