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IF THE READER OF DR. CHRZANOWSKI'S PAPER reflects on why this essay is so especially stimulating, I predict he will discover a reason
beyond the clear, unmystifying demonstration of the complex interplay between analytic listening and the patient's self-esteem: Dr. Chrzanowski shows us the actual molding of the therapeutic interaction. Instead of reasoning backward from a therapeutic triumph to the inevitable foundation on which it necessarily had to be built, Dr. Chrzanowski has disciplined himself to look first and fairly at how his perceptions and actions came about and how they were responded to. Such studies are as fundamental to the progress of our field as they are rare in the literature. They alone can provide something that can be considered data.
As data, they can be analysed in many different ways. Ultimately for example, they can be exploited for the theory of therapeutic action. My own interest here, however, is with the narrower question of the place and function of cognition in psychoanalytic listening.
That is a funny question, to be sure. After all, what isn't cognitive in listening? Nothing experienced in the consulting room is sharply separated from cognition. But there are gradations we are all familiar with. The analyst probably absorbs the scene through a spectrum of responses, at one end of which his grasp is spontaneous, affective, personal, and interactive, while at the other, it is deliberate, abstract, systematic, theoretical, and impersonal. At one end of the spectrum, situations are recognized by reacting to them, as when we adapt our hand to a cup, or get angry at an insult. At the other end, we think to ourselves about the patient, and call our registrations "cognitions."
But theory and thinking are not all at one side, nor affect and action at the other. The