Uneasy Listening: Notes on Hearing and Being Heard. By Anouchka Grose and Robert Brewer Young. London:  MACK Books, 2022,  96 pp., $18.00 paperback.

Uneasy Listening: Notes on Hearing and Being Heard by Anouchka Grose and Robert Brewer Young challenges assumptions about listening and its value. Its authors raise a host of questions regarding listening's potentiality and materiality; however, I am not sure that Grose and Young stay with the trouble long enough for us to discover new truths about listening (and its attendant unease).

Young, a respected luthier, spends his life listening to the wetness of wood, to the sing of a saw as he constructs high-end instruments for some of the best violinists and cellists in the world. Grose lives quite a different listening life, spending her hours listening to patients in Lacanian analysis. Uneasy Listening is a brief book structured as an ongoing dialogue between two individuals who spend their lives listening. The reader listens to them trying to figure out how to talk—and listen—to one another about their listening. In my doctoral dissertation in philosophy, I explored the complexities and difficulties of the self/other relationship using the methodology of psychoanalytic listening (Hitchcock, 2023). Hence, this topic has fascinated me for over a decade, and I came to Uneasy Listening with strong hopes.

In the philosophical and psychoanalytic literature, thinking about listening holds several axiomatic truths, such as that listening is disruptive to the subject's—and potentially the culture's—status quo (Lipari, 2014; Nancy, 2002/2007; Szendy, 2008). Listening can operate only in asymmetry (Lipari, 2014). Listening-thinking has a different logic than thinking based on visual or spatial metaphors (Sterne, 2012). Listening can

function as a form of psychic withdrawal (Barbara, 1973). These ideas pose essential problems for the analyst-patient relationship to be thought through in detail. In Uneasy Listening, a few of these ideas are raised as