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“Generative psychoanalytic listening involves acts of sensibility, engagement, and imagination” (p. 3)—Fred Griffin introduces his approach to the activity of analytic listening with those words. He would have us go way beyond the concept of the analyst as passive observer and interpreter. Creative listening includes our senses and our emotions. In the richer space of emotional listening, the experience of the patient is to be comprehended in a way that may be communicated back to him/her, so that s/he feels understood in a way that permits risking growth with less fear of annihilation or of falling into the abyss of abandonment.
It is noted that Freud's original depiction was of the analyst's unconscious as a sense organ. Therefore, a concept of evenly suspended attention is incomplete, and our current topographic and structural metapsychological models are insufficient to describe the creative element integral to the growth of one person through a dynamic process in the presence of another. A useful model for psychoanalysis must include a vision of an analytic space involving sensation and felt experience. It is this space that Griffin seeks to describe through the lens of imaginative literature.
The concepts culminating in this book have been formulated over a long time. Griffin began to turn to imaginative literature as an aid toward regaining a reflective capacity during a difficult period in his life that occurred many years ago. He noticed that the “emotional atmospheres” (p. 6) created by certain writers, including Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Marcel Proust, and William Carlos Williams, could enhance his focus on an analysand's experience. He envisions Creative Learning and the Psychoanalytic Process as a guide for clinicians to learn and to teach how to “translate the richness of literary fiction into something clinically useful”