Does Phillips contradict himself here? Is making people »see what it is they do feel« not bringing about a kind of self-knowledge? (An elementary case of »seeing« would be to discern the ambiguous hatred beneath which the analyst suspects there is hidden love (or vice versa).) The answer is that knowledge gained in analysis is a knowledge to be forgotten, discarded: once I »see what it is that I feel,« I don’t go on dwelling in it, I just leave it behind – why? Not because of some decisionist mystique (“to be creative, one should overcome Hamlet-like procrastinations, too much self-analyzing, and just do it!”) but because the true task of analysis is to open up a void in the midst of our subjectivity: when we discard the knowledge gained in analysis, we open ourselves to this void

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