Creative listening and the psychoanalytic process: Sensibility, engagement and envisioning, by Fred L. Griffin

Psychoanalysis and literature share the medium of language and proceed through the shaping, interrupting and deepening of narrative, but that is not all they share. As Ogden has articulated, psychoanalysis and literature both require of their protagonist couples – analysand‐analyst, and writer‐reader – imagination, which is the basis for a live attunement and receptivity from which spring “spontaneously invented or newly discovered metaphors” (Ogden, 1997). Fred Griffin's creative, interesting book, Creative Listening and the Psychoanalytic Process: Sensibility, Engagement and Envisioning, depicts good psychoanalytic listening as a generative, active process. When analysts are threatened by emotional currents in our lives or in the consulting room, or otherwise find ourselves in a darkness that collapses or obscures analytic space, we may turn, he writes, to more content‐driven models or reductive genetic interpretations, in an effort to regain the footing of certainty. The constructs that arise when working this way translate analysands into two‐dimensional ideas “now inhabiting emotionally sterile environments of theory that hold little vitality or potential for emotional growth” (p. 4). Instead, Griffin works towards a psychoanalytic listening that actively engages imaginatively and creatively. This active engagement involves

analysts not only following associations but also leading the analysand, through apprehending “palpable shapes of experience that we can hold in our minds … and … creating passages from outside to inside these psychic spaces” (p. 63). Such acts of listening are not just preliminary to the formulation of insight, but are themselves a center of therapeutic action.

Griffin's goal in this book is to teach a method for developing or regaining a capacity for creative listening, one he uses in his clinical work and teaching. The method involves plumbing the depths of literary wr