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“You will see how different it is. You will finally learn how to listen to your patients' unconscious communication.” With these words, my supervisor-to-be introduced me to one of the challenges of analytic work while at the
same time launching me into a sea of confusion and uncertainty with at least a dash of self-doubt. The prospect of listening to the unconscious was admittedly extremely exciting, but at the same time terrifying. Would I be up to the challenge? After all, I had been functioning as one of those psychodynamically oriented psychotherapists for almost 30 years by the time I started my psychoanalytic training. Would I be able to change my listening style? How would I know when I was hearing my patients' unconscious? And even more fundamentally, if I was now to embark on this journey of listening to my patients' unconscious, what had I been listening to for the last 30 years? It must clearly have been something else. And yet, I experienced no clarity at all as I tried to identify those aspects of my non-analytic listening that would now need to be shed, like an old skin, so that I could cultivate this, in my and not my supervisor's words, newer, deeper, better way of listening.
So, I begin to listen. I will share with you a brief clinical vignette that provides one example of my beginnings as an analytic listener.
My patient arrived just on time to see the previous patient leave my office. This had never happened before. So this was the first time that she had indisputable physical and little-desired evidence that she was not my only patient. When I went to get her, she did not immediately follow me into my office as she usually did. She lingered in the waiting area for quite awhile and then made her way in very slowly. When she sat down, she began to tell me about her visit to the dentist's office earlier that same morning. She told me about what a busy practice he has, with so many patients, that no sooner has one left his office than another walks i