Acceptance of the Unknown

As a therapy and method of understanding, contemporary psychoanalysis generally replaces prescription with patience. Instead of prescribing what must be for mental health, psychoanalysis focuses on understanding and what relations demand. The significance of psychoanalysis is in its ability to explain the production of meaning, the debt of expression to desire, and the processes that break down the production of meaning. Instead of making definite claims about the truth and certainty of treatment, psychoanalysis indicates an art and systematic methodology for understanding the process of understanding. In so doing psychoanalysis dispossesses us of the conviction that we simply know what we know.