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What might be called the immediate appeal of the narrative explanation does not apply only to our formal interpretations; it also plays a significant role in how we try to listen and how the patient tries to associate. We have seen how both free association and “evenly-hovering attention” may be more active and deliberate than we have tended to assume. It now appears that we can understand both of these activities as attempts to enrich the narrative truth of the utterance. Active listening is required because the patient's associations—fragmentary, ambiguous, and allusive—lack the coherence we would find in a fully naturalized text. Because they do not speak for themselves, they must be supplemented with other associations before they can be understood, and often, as we have seen, these additional meanings are projected onto the material. The act of constructive listening is largely in the service of strengthening the narrative voice of the material; we try to give it narrative form in order to better understand.
Free-floating attention, then, could be better characterized