Psychoanalytic listening: Between unconscious and conscious

Psychoanalytic listening can be deployed for enhancing the quality of clinical psychiatric practice. As a clinical skill, it should be teachable throughout the years of psychiatric residency. Nevertheless, the teaching of such important faculty is difficult due to the scarcity of a systematic, relatively structured model that can be used as an underpinning of learning that capability. This article is aimed at fulfilling a part of that lack of teaching methodology. The model offered in this article describes psychoanalytic listening as a mental process initiated by the therapist, which then goes through the patient too, which involves a continuing oscillation of unconscious apprehension and conscious comprehension. This rhythmic proceeding of affectively experiencing and rationally considering will expectedly bring about a mutual understanding between patient and therapist which then facilitates further clinical enterprises.

Is the Noise the Message in Psychoanalytic Listening?

In psychoanalytic discourse, the question of meaning or lack thereof should be relegated only to the domain of the interlocutor's perception. Not every slip of the tongue or bungled action is necessarily precipitated by some unconscious motivation, although one may construct meaning for it après coup (Nachträglichkeit). What is a message versus a noise depends on the perceptual experience of the analytic couple, and a cigar, if not just a cigar, depends on the context-specific fantasy of the perceiver. The author's aim is to show the difficulty of distinguishing the noise from the message in the interactive matrix of the analytic situation. Yet what at first may seem to be a banal error such as double-booking may at times enliven a stultified course of the analytic process; it may even drag a stillborn transference out of its embalmed closet.