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The subject of attention in analysis has received curiously little direct attention over the years, despite clear and consistent guidelines from Freud on the technique of maintaining “evenly suspended attention.” This essential aspect of analytic technique has been “one of the least discussed, certainly one of the least well conceptualized aspects of psychoanalysis” (Gray, 1973, p. 474). Yet the subject has not been completely ignored. What has occurred over the years has been a steady, subtle, and very gradual shift in emphasis from Freud's original method, such that the concept has been redefined, its meaning altered, and the very words used to represent it changed. In the process, relatively little effort has gone into preserving Freud's original intent: to provide a means whereby the analyst might achieve access to his own unconscious processes in the service of analytic understanding.
In a series of papers published between 1900 and 1923, Freud was very clear about both the method and the purpose of achieving evenly suspended attention. In a parallel to free association, when the “uncritical self-observer” takes “the trouble to suppress the critical faculty” (Freud, 1900, pp. 134-136),