Main description:

The importance of knowing and being known is at the heart of the human experience and has always been the core of the psychoanalytic enterprise. Freud named his central Oedipal construct after Sophocles' great play that dramatically encapsulated the desire, difficulty, and dangers involved in knowing and being known. Psychoanalysis' founder developed a methodology to facilitate unconscious material becoming conscious, that is, making the unknown known to help us better understand ourselves and our relational lives, including psychic trauma, and multigenerational histories.

This book will stimulate readers to contemplate knowing and being known from multiple perspectives. It bursts with thought-provoking ideas and intriguing cases illuminated by penetrating reflections from diverse theoretical perspectives. It will sensitize readers to this theme's omnipresent, varied importance in the clinical setting and throughout life. Accomplished contributors discuss a wide variety of fascinating topics, illustrated by rich clinical material. Their contributions are grouped under these headings: Knowing through dreams; Knowing through appearances; Dreading and longing to be known; The analyst's ways of knowing and communicating; Knowing in the contemporary sociocultural context; The known analyst; and No longer known. Readers will find each section deeply informative, stimulating thought, insights, and ideas for clinical practice.

Psychoanalytic Explorations in Knowing and Being Known will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, clinical social workers, counselors, students in these disciplines, and members of related scholarly communities.

Contents:

Introduction Ionas Sapountzis & Rebecca Coleman Curtis

Knowing through Dreams

Dreams: The Known, Unknown, Being Known and Learning to Know Robert I. Watson, Jr.

The Escape from Alligator Mom Robert Akeret

Failure to Launch: Waiting to be Known/Dreading Being Known Stephen Hyman
On Knowing the Future Brent Willock

Knowing Through Appearances

5. The Secrets of Eating and the Eating of Secrets: Daring to be Known Jean Petrucelli

6. The Analytic Dialogue: Looking at and Listening to Each Other Anita Weinreb Katz

Dreading and Longing to be Known

7. The Little Girl and Detective Monk Ionas Sapountzis

8. I won't know you if you won't know me: Irrelationship and the Benefits of Bad Relationships Mark B. Borg, Jr., Grant H. Brenner, & Daniel Berry

The Analyst's Ways of Knowing and Communicating

9. Knowing and Being Known: The Effect of the Analyst's Affection Dan Perlitz

10. Winnicott's True Self/False Self Concept: Using Countertransference to Uncover the True Self MaryBeth Cresci

11. Knowing Myself Through Knowing Him Harriette Kaley

12. Spiritual Knowing, Not Knowing, and Being Known Nina Cerfolio

Knowing in the Contemporary Sociocultural Context

13. Income Inequality and Psychoanalytic Practice: An Unexamined Juxtaposition John O'Leary

14. Invisible Immigration: Family Building across Borders and Bodies Anne Malave

15. Madoff's Family Business: If the Sons Didn't Know. Psychodynamics of a Financial Fraud Claudia Diez

16. Catfishing: The New Impostor Danielle Knafo

The Known Analyst

17. The Therapist Revealed: Who Knows What, When? Bruce Hammer

18. Dialectics of Desire: Longing and Fear of Being 'Known' in the Injured Analyst Marsha Aileen Hewitt

No Longer Known

19. The Altered Brain and the Illusion of Knowing J. Gail White & Michelle Flax

20. The Unrecognized Analyst Jeffrey Sacks

Concluding Thoughts Ionas Sapountzis