Not-Knowing
Throughout my psychoanalytic education I will periodically fall into a prolonged spell of confusion and uncertainty where nothing makes any sense. This happens about every nine months and it is happening now: I have reached an intellectual nadir; the lowest point of comprehension where concepts that were once coherent evaporate into foggy unreality. This feeling of uncertainty is compounded and converted into anxiety by the fact that I have begun seeing patients; if the patient expects me to be the person-who-is-supposed-to-know, how can I begin to help them if, in fact, I do not know anything? To the enemies of the unconscious (you know who you are) this would be no great surprise: it’s confusing because its confused: why spend time, or money, on this spooky gobbledygook when you can just do a few sessions of CBT or take a prescription drug? Daylight, neuro-science, quick-cures and Lexapro are vastly superior (and more dominant) than the ambivalent uncertainties of this numinous and crackpot pseudoscience; or so your insurance company may want you to believe. So it may be likewise confounding and categorically inconceivable to the average psychiatrist—or philosopher of daylight for that matter—that an epistemological limit is a basic feature—and not a bug—of the psychoanalytic project. Like Zen Buddhism, unknowing is a virtue here, if not a position in and of itself. While this position of not-knowing may be extrapolated into a philosophy—or a non-philosophy rather—it should be thought of first and foremost as a therapeutic stance. A stance that can be summed up by the classic technique of evenly suspended attention. This particular kind of attention is the very antenna of the unconscious: to perceive without judgment, or even without thought, is to perceive more than your typical ego-perception will allow. From the therapeutic standpoint of evenly suspended attention then, theory is an impediment to attention. Theory itself, of whatever kind, expresses a subjective desire that may well run contrary to the clinical path. It is for this reason, and perhaps this reason alone, that psychoanalytic theory can only ever be provisional, or, as it has been said, “a mythology.” My own confusion arises from a (probably reactionary) desire to regard the psyche as if it had a discernable anatomy.
The Treachery of Images, 1929, Rene Magritte
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