Chapter 7 ‘Listening to Listening’ and Après-Coup (1993)*

This essay presents ideas, which I formulated in 1981, about a function performed by the analyst during the session, namely that of listening. Let us take up the main theoretical ideas by way of four propositions:

• 1 The first is that the patient speaks and listens on the basis of his unconscious identifications, which are a constituent part of his psyche.

• 2 The second concerns what the patient does with our interpretations: He listens to the analyst's silence and interpretations and reinterprets them in accordance with his unconscious identifications. These reinterpretations are in general kept in silence; the analyst then has difficulty in recognizing them unless he listens to them attentively. I consider that the analyst's recognition of the patient's reinterpretations is of decisive importance.

• 3 The third proposition concerns the meaning acquired by the interpretation following the patient's reinterpretation: It assumes a retroactive meaning,which depends on how the patient listened to it.

• 4 The fourth proposition relates to the complete cycle of the interpretation, which must include what the patient does with the interpretation and the analyst's search for the fate the patient has bestowed on it. In other words, the interpretative cycle does not end with the analyst's interpretation.1

If we can avoid the notion of a sequence of events in time shaped by a linear determinism we come closer to what I am trying to convey. Freud adopts a

dialectical approach to the patient's history in stating that the patient subjects the events of the past to subsequent (nachträglich) revision. In 1896 he wrote to Fliess: ‘The material present in the form of memory traces [is] […] subjected from time to time to a re-arrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances – to a re-transcription’ (Freud 1896 [1950]: 233).

A radical distinction must be drawn