Chapter 8 Listening Out, Listening in, Looking Out, Looking In

And still, even when he could do nothing for a sufferer, he always conversed with him; not on higher matters, as one might have hoped, but on very insignificant affairs … Strangely enough, people went away happy, saying that he knew how to listen, that by following your little tale he uncovered the grieving thread of your soul.

Psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic therapists have to listen in two directions at once: externally to their patients, and internally to whatever thoughts and feelings this stirs up in themselves. Psychoanalytic listening is a double process, directed inwards and outwards at the same time, both vectors essential, continuously active and interdependent. The evolution and the implications of this kind of listening are a thread running through this and the following chapters.

Freud was a doctor, a neurologist used to eliciting his patients’ histories. Doctors know, by and large, the kind of information they need for the purpose of diagnosis and treatment. That is what they listen for, and it is taken for granted that the person under scrutiny is the patient, not the doctor. Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud, 1893–1895), where the history of psychoanalytic listening begins, shows Freud well entrenched in such a mode. A long footnote to the case of Miss Lucy R. (112–14) reveals how insistently, not to say relentlessly, he would extract from patients what he was determined they should tell him. In the chapter on therapeutic technique, he says:

It is of course of great importance for the progress of the analysis that one should always turn out to be in the right vis-à-vis the patient, otherwise one would always be dependent on what he chose to tell one.

Set that, however, against this comment during Freud’s treatment of Katharina.

I told her to go on and tell me whatever occurred to her, in the confident expectation that she would think of precisely what I needed to e