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I shall refer throughout this essay to the concept of après-coup (Nachträglichkeit, ‘deferred action’ according to Strachey), which entails the twin elements of anticipation and retroactive meaning. I hope that the reader too, by a similar retroactive process, will find that new light has been cast on what is already known about psychic reality and, thereby, links will have been forged between the concepts of psychic reality, historical truths and psychic truths, on the one hand, and those of decentred listening and misunderstanding, on the other. In proposing the concepts of ‘decentred listening’ and of ‘listening to listening’, I wish to add a new dimension to the already familiar notions of evenly suspended attention and free association.
‘Someone is speaking to someone’; ‘someone is listening to someone’; ‘someone is reading someone’: From my chosen perspective, this listening and this reading are already interpretations. In an analysis, both the analysand and the analyst are speaking about something that is absent from the point of view of material reality. This absent object is a psychoanalytic psychic object. In the session, for example, we interpret not a dream, which is an absent object, but the account of a dream, which forms part of the context of the history of the transference. The account is communicated to someone – that is to say, it has an addressee in the transference. We may recall that Freud once interpreted to one of his woman patients that the wish fulfillment in her dream was to demonstrate that Freud was wrong, that the theory of dreams as wish fulfillment was incorrect. The patient's unconscious wish was to thwart Freud's wish.