The great irony of psychoanalytic theory is that it is an intellectually complex and highly refined body of knowledge that must then be negated in the discourse of the consulting room. Analysts maintain that the truth of unconscious desire is at odds with any information that can be imparted didactically. The trainee analyst, immersed in books and seminars, is supplied with clever answers to clinical questions that she must keep to herself. This is the potentially austere code of practice for the psychoanalyst – you don’t teach people how to live. But, does maintaining this anti-didactic ideal result in the clinical space being emptied of a wealth of dazzlingly counter-intuitive ideas that might prove interesting and helpful to analysands? Or is this a rule that is meant to be broken by the analyst’s cryptic encoding of educational messages? These questions increase in intensity in the face of looming catastrophe - does the analyst sit back and watch things fall apart for the sake of a categorical imperative that we cannot assume what is ‘good’ for the analysand?

My professional career has been sheltered and shepherded by Bion’s adage of learning from experience. That statement legitimized something inherent in me that otherwise felt disparaged and devalued: how deeply embodied learning, meaning, and truth feel to me. His warnings regarding imposed knowledge are met by Lacan in his later work, where he even more insistently marks the limits of what we might know about self or other. What is left then, are the marks an individual makes. Much like tracking a trail through the forest, we can learn something about the person through the patterns of the tracks they leave behind. Thus, we might learn, without knowing in a way that closes out further learning. This is the space I hope to keep open in my clinical work. As it becomes clearer to me the type of space in which learning might happen, I find that those entering it are better able to make use of it in their own ways. They seem to either land on the side of possibility or of danger, each of which is present. At times, people want something more structured that they can ‘hang their hat on’. I will discuss a few moments in recent clinical work, where I can see these choices being made, as people enter the space and make use of it in their own ways.

Psychoanalysis from a Lacanian perspective is not so much a process that depends upon learning, of insight, and much less is it a process of re-learning (e.g., being re-parented or undergoing corrective emotional experiences). Instead, Lacanian psychoanalysis is a process of unlearning, of deconstruction, of questioning and revisioning the very essence of who you took yourself to be, the narrative of your life, your perspectives of others and of the Other. Paradoxically, the analysand must be brought to “learn” the limits of learning or the limits of understanding in the form of productive encounters with the lack in the Other and the lack in the self. The result of this unlearning is a type of savoir-faire, a knowing what to do with the unconscious, and with the symptom, which is itself a new kind of learning. I will argue that the analyst assists the analysand in this endeavor through a radical questioning stance that is paradoxically associated with what I am calling “negative empathy”, or a knowing that you cannot understand.

A fundamental principle of the work of psychoanalysis is transference. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, transference is argued to exist in the presence of a peculiar construction, i.e., the subject supposed of knowing (le sujet supposé savoir). Indeed, Lacan goes on to argue that this construction or ‘structure’ is the very precondition for the work of analysis to take place. Typically (and most commonly in neurosis), when the analyst is endowed with this supposition of knowing or knowledge, the analysand addresses the analyst with questions and demands designed to elicit this knowledge, a knowledge which is fantasised as having a value for the analysand. In this way, the analyst can be addressed in the transference as the one who knows and therefore can teach something to the analysand that is worth knowing about themselves. In this paper, I want to look at how this demand is articulated in the clinic by adolescents and their parents and how the analyst is tasked with the paradoxical operation of “knowing something” but “teaching nothing”.