The Struggle To Listen: Continuing Reflections, Lingering Paradoxes, and Some Thoughts On Recovery of Memory

Abstract

This paper offers a further expansion of the author's continuing endeavor to highlight and explore subtle distinctions and lingering paradoxes in how we listen, and to reconsider their profound implications for clinical work and discovery. Several perhaps commonplace clinical moments are used to sharpen illumination on psychic experience that might otherwise remain outside conscious awareness, whether in the domain of the repressed or in other mnemonic realms, such as "implicit" or "procedural" memory. It is suggested that added dimensions of these different levels of memory may, through our struggle to listen, be ultimately knowable.

Three experiential practices and their relation to psychoanalysis.

“…In this stretch, what helped me cope was a conscious cultivation of the Zen attitude of not knowing, embracing it as a good. This attitude of not knowing is consonant with Schwaber's (2004) often enunciated view that effective analytic listening can be enhanced by being open to what we do not know, which is sometimes to be preferred to guiding the patient toward what we already know. If we suspend knowledge, maintain an open inquiry, and let the "things themselves" reveal themselves, ultimately our categories of analytic understanding will have a greater richness and power.…”

Psychoanalysis: Romantic, not wild.

“…Attunement, or affective synchrony similar to musical harmony, captures an affective resonance with the analysand's experience that is invaluable in bringing unconscious patterns to light and helping patients feel deeply understood. Some analysts are so moved by the power of this experience that they equate it with therapeutic action (e.g., Schwaber, 1990Schwaber, , 1992Schwaber, , 2005. However, this clinical strategy, being limited to topographic shifts, lacks a concept for creating the new form necessary for the goal of self formation.…”