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Consider these two descriptions of the psychoanalytic process:
[The clinician] can rely on the patient's capacity to produce during a series of therapeutic encounters a sequence of (freely associated) themes, thoughts and affects which seek their own concordance…this basic synthesizing trend in the clinical material itself…permits the clinician to observe with free-floating attention…and to expect sooner or later a confluence of the patient's search for curative clarification and his own endeavor to recognize meaning and relevance [Erikson, 1958, p. 86].
Free-floating attention, then, could be better characterized as constructive listening in the service of understanding. This understanding is shared between analyst and patient; unwitting interpretations that facilitate the initial listening by the analyst lead directly to formal interpretations that supply continuity for the patient. [Free-floating attention] is not the automatic decoder of free association…an interpretation (seen as an artistic product) achieves its effect through something analogous to the well-known suspension of disbelief [Spence, 1982, p. 81].
In the first, we have Freud's picture of the analyst who, as he listens in the recommended free-floating, evenly suspended way to the patient's freely associated thoughts and feelings, is led sooner or later to interpretations that fit the synthesizing trend of the clinical material—curative, at least in