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Psychoanalytic listening, which is the peculiar nature of the kind of listening that should characterize the work of the psychoanalyst, is one of the main topics of Sigmund Freud's well-known and very important essay “Recommendations to physicians practicing psychoanalysis” (1912). He succeeds in coming to the definition that still guides our daily work, by answering the following questions: “How can we remember all the things we hear every day from all our patients?” and “What kind of a listening process should we develop in order to get in touch with our patients’ unconscious and/or allow them to do this themselves?” It is by trying to answer these questions that Freud formulates the famous principle of gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit, that is, “evenly-suspended attention.” In his words, this technique consists in fact of
not directing one's notice to anything in particular and in maintaining the same ‘evenly-suspended attention’ … in the face of all that one hears. … It will be seen that the rule of giving equal notice to everything is the necessary counterpart to the demand made on the patient that he should communicate everything that occurs to him without criticism or selection. … The rule for the doctor may be expressed: ‘He should withhold all conscious influences from his capacity to attend, and give himself over completely to his ‘unconscious memory’. Or, to put it purely in terms of technique: ‘He should simply listen, and not bother about whether he is keeping anything in mind’. (Freud, 1912, pp. 111–112)
To make a complex and long history shorter, let us now take into consideration the contribution of Harry Stack Sullivan . He not only doubted that the patients’ associations could really be free, and not also depend on how patient and analyst experience each other and what kind of an interaction develops between them, but also came to the point of formulating the principle of “participant observation.” According to this, our capacity to listen depends on