The Impossibility of Knowing: Dilemmas of a Psychotherapist

By: Jackie Gerrard

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Synopsis: This is a book that assembles and integrates the author's clinical work and thinking over the many years of her working life. Part 1 focuses on patients with specific types of psychopathology and explores particular difficulties in technique and thinking. Part 2 addresses the issues of love, hate, and the erotic. In Part 3, specific challenges to the psychotherapeutic frame are demonstrated in chapters on enactments and on work with an absent patient. Richly illustrated throughout with clinical vignettes, above all, the author stresses the importance of the enquiring mind and the struggle not to "know" but to be ever ready to "not know" and to explore. The book should be of interest to qualified practitioners, to those who are training in psychodynamic or psychoanalytic work, and to anyone who has an interest in psychoanalysis and the "impossibility of knowing".