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In “to teach the noble game … The Transformation of the Listening Process into a Therapeutic Instrument,” Abby Adams-Silvan puts forward an extremely novel method for teaching how to hear the analysand, based on the “Recommendations” Freud offered us in his technical writings (Freud, 1912a).
If we achieve genuine contact with the analysand it is because we have reached a sufficient measure of neutrality, says Adams-Silvan, and from this it follows that we have transformed ordinary listening into a therapeutic instrument. Momentarily casting off the secondary process, the analyst accompanies the patient in his regression and this leads to a special use of memory.
Adams-Silvan has conceived a very special technique, through which the teacher presents material of his own, stimulating his students to a “special habit of apperception and the use of memory” where “the candidates tend to be able to give freer rein to their wish to ‘play’ and indulge their curiosity in the analytic situation.”
Adams-Silvan's proposal is interesting and well thought out, and consequently worth attempting, since we do not have many methods at our disposal with which to teach candidates how they should listen to their patients, or rather how they should hear them.
Though I understand and value Adams-Silvan's method, there is one point I disagree with, however, and that is the use it makes of a restricted concept of countertransference. Here, undoubtedly, we are up against a semantic problem and the individual analyst's personal