The Art and Science of Psychoanalysis1

In a well-known passage in one of his technical papers, Freud makes some recommendations about how a psychoanalyst should listen to his patient's free associations. "The technique … is a very simple one, " he writes. "It … consists in making no effort to concentrate the attention on anything in particular, and in maintaining in regard to all that one hears the same measure of calm, quiet attentiveness—of 'evenly-hovering attention, ' as I once before described it. In this way a strain which could not be kept up for several hours daily and a danger inseparable from deliberate attentiveness are avoided. For as soon as attention is deliberately concentrated in a certain degree, one begins to select from the material before one; one point will be fixed in the mind with particular clearness and some other consequently disregarded, and in this selection one's expectations or one's inclinations will be followed. This is just what must not be done, however; if one's expectations are followed in this selection there is the danger of never finding anything but what is already known, and if one follows one's inclinations anything which is to be perceived will most certainly be falsified. It must not be forgotten that the meaning of the things one hears is, at all events for the most part, only recognizable later on." Later he adds, "All conscious exertion is to be withheld from the capacity for attention, and one's 'unconscious memory' is to be given full play. … One has simply to listen and not to trouble to keep in mind anything in particular" (3, pp. 324-325).

Still later in the same paper he suggests that the analyst "must bend his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the