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The Listening Process. Robert Langs, M.D. New York: Jason Aronson, 1978, 661 pp. + xix.
Ever since Freud, psychoanalysts have espoused two competing models of man: as a mental apparatus and as interlocutor, i.e., one who alternates between speaking and listening. But mental apparatuses do not talk to each other; interlocutors do. And they do so in a variety of styles: clearly or confusedly, truthfully or deceitfully, soothingly or hurtfully, lovingly or hatefully.
For nearly a decade, the psychoanalytic investigator Robert Langs has written prolifically and forcefully in favor of the communicational model and the interlocutors in the psychoanalytic conversation. In the early seventies he published the compendious Technique of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and in 1976 The Bipersonal Field, marking a transition point. Now comes The Listening Process, reflecting another phase in the development of his thought and offering his new look at the psychoanalytic method.
The emphasis is on psychoanalytic method, not theory or doctrine, a distinction masterfully made by the teacher of Paul Ricoeur, Roland Dalbiez, in his seminal work, The Psychoanalytic Method and the Freudian Doctrine.4 In brief, methods are operational principles governing activities, such as the method of free association as applied to the activity called psychoanalyzing. Doctrines are hypotheses and assumptions about what causes activities, such as the theories about the role of the instinctual drives in the etiology of the neuroses, psychic energy, narcissism, the self, growth, and development. Except for a brief excursus into Bion's fancy theorizing about alpha and beta functions, Langs has stayed within the limits of a methodological investigation throughout.