ABSTRACT
This chapter offers some thoughts about listening. It presents a poem with listening and speaking activities of a patient in analysis. Over the course of the past fifty years, there have been a number of important shifts in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. The chapter focuses on the ways a poem grapples with the challenge of getting into the language the full richness, complexity, and movement of living human experience. It provides a piece of criticism that treats the analytic session as a literary "text". The chapter addresses the experience of the Frost poem and the analytic experience each in its own terms. The use of language must be equal to the task of capturing and conveying in words a sense of "what's going on here"—in the intrapsychic and intersubjective life of the analysis, the "music of what happens" in the analytic relationship.
