Listening with Your Gut: The Role of Intuition Boundary Judgments

ABSTRACT

Boundary dilemmas are an important aspect of clinical social work. The author presents a case example to demonstrate the use of clinical intuition to arrive at a judgment in one such dilemma. The analytic literature suggests that intuition is best understood as unconscious communication. Cognitive research has offered two alternative models of intuition: the heuristics model and the learning model. The case presented illustrates that perhaps the psychoanalytic understanding of intuition as unconscious communication and the cognitive learning model operated in tandem to help the therapist arrive at a decision that served the client and treatment goals in this particular case.

KEYWORDS:

• Clinical intuition
• intuition as heuristics
• learning model of intuition
• moral intuitionism
• unconscious communication

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Margaret Arnd-Caddigan

Margaret Arnd-Caddigan, PhD, LCSW, is a clinical social worker. She is an associate professor of East Carolina University School of Social Work, associate faculty at the Psychoanalytic Education Center of the Carolinas, and codirector of the Greenville Psychoanalytic Study Group and has a small private practice in Greenville, North Carolina.