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Gemma Corradi Fiumara is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rome University and a practicing member of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society. She has written another book, The Symbolic Function and the Philosophy of Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), thus revealing her scholarly dedication to the understanding of the function of language in human life, especially in the areas of discourse and knowledge. The book I am reviewing is entirely philosophical. Its
core proposal, however, is so central to analytic theory and technique that it cannot be ignored by psychoanalysts interested in the cultural stance and philosophical underpinnings of psychoanalysis.
Corradi Fiumara opens her book by observing that among the many meanings of the "Greek term logos there do not appear to be recognizable references to the notion and capacity of listening; in the tradition of western thought we are faced with a system of knowledge that tends to ignore the listening process" (p. 1). The consequences of such conceptual absence affects us in the present: "Elevated to an essential principle of our culture … [it] appears to control and shape all of our rational pursuits… At any moment in which reality is constructed we can identify an attitude which is able to say and not to listen" (p. 2). The social repercussions are even more staggering: "The mechanism of 'saying without listening' has multiplied and spread, to finally constitute itself as a generalized form of domination and control" (p. 2). Confirming evidence about the inattention to listening comes from the fact that "in our culture there has always been a vast profusion of scholarly works focusing on expressive activity and very few, almost none in comparison, devoted to the study of listening" (pp. 5-6). (I checked our own performance and discovered that the Chicago Psychoanalytic Literature Index does not have an entry for 'listening' before 1970.)
Corradi Fiumara proposes that "we could start out by admittin