Against understanding: why understanding should not be viewed as an essential aim of psychoanalytic treatment

The current emphasis on understanding in psychoanalysis--on the analysand's part as well as on the analyst's--is excessive if we assume that the most essential aim of psychoanalytic treatment is change. Situated within the Lacanian register or dimension of the imaginary, the process of understanding can be seen to reduce the unfamiliar to the familiar, to transform the radically other into the same, and to render the analyst hard of hearing. Our ability as analysts to detect the unconscious via slips of the tongue, slurred words, mixed metaphors, and the like is compromised by our emphasis on understanding and can be rectified only by taking as our fundamental premise that we do not understand what our analysands are saying. The emphasis on understanding can also do a disservice to analysands, who learn to observe themselves and to explain their feelings and behaviors to themselves and others in sophisticated terms without necessarily changing. But change can perfectly well occur in the absence of understanding, which in fact often impedes change.