Against Understanding Volume 2

<p><em>Against Understanding Volume 2</em> casts a spotlight on the status of case studies in psychoanalysis which are commonly used to illustrate clinicians’ expertise and mastery rather than patients’ actual itineraries. When a case is presented the complex unwieldy and often self-contradictory material of a therapeutic trajectory is often vastly oversimplified in view of producing a linear narrative that seems perfectly to fit the parameters of a practitioner’s preferred theoretical framework. </p><p>Bruce Fink attempts to eschew the appearance of mastery in assembling clinical material and in discussing his approach to practice and theory in the myriad case histories and vignettes included in both Volumes 1 & 2 of <i>Against Understanding</i>. To counterbalance the kind of paring down of material usually carried out to make cases conform to a particular paradigm the case write-ups presented here include much of the raw data so often omitted: verbatim quotes from patients about their lives backgrounds dreams and fantasies; and details about the many obscure vacillating and unruly phases of treatment. <b>Fink</b> hopes thereby to allow readers to form their own opinions about the well-foundedness or unsoundness of his formulations interpretations and interventions. </p><p>This second part of a two-volume collection of papers interviews and case studies provides the reader with hundreds of illustrations of Lacanian theory in practice and will be essential for psychoanalysts psychotherapists psychiatrists psychologists social workers and counselors.</p>