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This is a book about what it is to attend, listen, be receptive psychoanalytically to patients. It is a subject not often enough approached directly in the analytic literature but one that is especially important, as its author recognizes, in the face of the current push towards the manualization and audit of psychotherapy which threatens to replace listening to the patient with an open mind with listening for preconceived material. The author is concerned with listening to, and takes a highly original approach. Instead of using clinical examples he explores works by carefully selected artists and writers that confront us with particular challenges: Goya, Hölderlin and Novalis, Baudelaire, Poe, Alfred de Vigny and Keats. The challenge represented by each is offered as a reminder of, or as a sort of refresher course for, an aspect of the analytic attitude that the author proposes.
The author presents Goya as requiring ‘us to endure our anxiety, as he finds ever more inventive ways of confronting us with what lurks in the shadows: the repressed and denied, rage, perversity, malignant narcissism, the power of the collective and social unconscious’ (p. 65). He sees the collision of reason and unreason as the generating impulse in Goya's work. In the case of Hölderlin the collision is between a ‘striving for classical clarity’ and a ‘“Romantic” … recognition that such clarity was no longer compatible with truthfulness of utterance’ (p. 97). Snell links Novalis with Hölderlin, presenting both as alerting us simultaneously to ‘the importance of the particular spoken word — this word, not that — and to the fact that the word is always contingent and inadequate’ (p. 97). But whereas Hölderlin struggles with the limitations of language, for Novalis language is ‘explosive’ (p. 97), the outcropping of an excitability that searches for an unreachable unknown, so that incomprehensibility itself becomes a stimulus. Baudelaire serves the book's purpose as leading ‘us into a world th