A little knowledge…

There is an outdated idea, based on superficial appearances, that a patient’s sufferings result from a kind of ignorance, and that if only this ignorance could be overcome by effective communication . . . a recovery must follow. But the illness is not located in the ignorance itself, but in the foundation of ignorance, the inner resistances that are the cause of the ignorance and continue to sustain it . . . If knowledge of the unconscious were as important as those inexperienced in psychoanalysis believe it to be, then all you would need for a cure would be for the sufferer to listen to lectures or read books. However, that would have about as much impact on neurotic symptoms as distributing menus would have on hunger during a famine.

From Freud’s essay Wild Psychoanalysis 1910 in Michael Wood’s essay at LRB