Clinical Intuition under Scrutiny: From Potholes to Possibilities

ABSTRACT

The two commentaries on “Varieties of Clinical Intuition: Explicit, Implicit, and Nonlocal Neurodynamics” approach the subject from radically different perspectives. While de Peyer focuses on clinical aspects of utilizing local and nonlocal informational channels within analytic work, Butler brings up wider socio-political implications involved in the collaboration between psychoanalysis and the natural sciences. We affirm Butler’s social justice agenda while taking issue with his unwitting form of reductionism inherent in his post-modernist argument for hermeneutics in rejection of science’s role in psychoanalysis and confusion about different levels of self-organization in informational dynamics. We are entirely in agreement with de Peyer’s suggestion that affect is the connecting thread between all forms of intuition, including its uncanny dimensions. Our fractal epistemology supports her suggestion of fuzzy boundaries between local-interactive and nonlocal-participatory forms of intuitive knowing. We end with de Peyer’s questions surrounding the clinical value of intuitive information sharing, methods for its enhancement, and the importance of clinical judgment in working with “extraordinary knowing.”

This article responds to:

Feverish Nonknowledge, or Intuition at the Boiling Point

Portals through Liminal Space: Commentary on Shapiro and Marks-Tarlow’s “Varieties of Clinical Intuition”

Acknowlegements

We authors are gratified for the extended discussion surrounding local and nonlocal varieties of intuition. We thank the editors of Psychoanalytic Dialogues for allowing this topic to come out of the shadows, where it has all too often been relegated because of the absence of a strong conceptual framework.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yakov Shapiro

Yakov Shapiro, M.D., is a clinical professor of psychiatry, psychotherapy supervisor, and director of the integrated psychotherapy/psychopharmacology service (IPPS) at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.

Terry Marks-Tarlow

Terry Marks-Tarlow, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Santa Monica, California, who teaches and trains through the Insight Center, Los Angeles, and Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, California.