Letter from the Editor

For poet and essayist Louise Gluck (1994), the challenge of continuously becoming oneself, that unfinished and unending relationship of renewing an experience of one's beginning, is the essence of the creative process. Creating art and experiencing new thinking rely on remaking the self, or as Gluck writes: “The voice that never existed can issue only from the life that never existed” (p. 95). The search for this voice requires a lifelong finding and refinding of oneself, a process that relies on deep listening, both to oneself and — in the role of clinician helping patients with their own psychic development — to others.

When Gluck writes, “I wanted approval, but more than that I wanted to be heard, which is, I think, a more convincing proof of existence” (p. 109), she teaches how listening to and being heard by another is necessary for one to feel truly alive. Philosopher and psychoanalyst Corradi Fiumara (1990) similarly believes that listening and being listened to are central to the creative process of becoming oneself. She writes about a form of listening that is more than the capacity to be silent; it is a disposition in the mind of the listener to participate in the psychic world of the person who is speaking.

When a patient tells me: “She has trouble listening to me, but she can hear me,” she is helping me better understand the difference between being listened to and feeling that the other is empathically attuned. Corradi Fiumara's (2009) understanding of empathy emphasizes the experience of making contact with the other with the intent of “leaving their strangeness intact” (p. 103). Moving beyond the idea of empathy as broadly participating in a cognitive and affective understanding of the other person, her focus is on how transformative connection requires locating and then withstanding contact with difference and the “otherness” of the patient. It isn't until the patient feels that we are in contact with their alien or misunderstood parts that they can be