The Intimacy of Not Knowing and the Experience of Transcendence in the Clinical Relationship

ABSTRACT

In this paper I propose that reaching the limits of our ordinary ways of knowing as psychoanalysts can offer thresholds into new and vast experiences of transformation. I explore how emotional experiences of not knowing have their own authority in creating intimacy in the analytic dyad and an experience of transcendence. I use three clinical examples including my own experience as a patient to illustrate this.

KEYWORDS:

• Intersubjectivity
• sacred
• transformation
• complexity
• koan
• Buddhism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Margaret Allan

Margaret Allan, Psy.D., is a Senior Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis Los Angeles with a private practice in Westlake Village, California.