ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic listening, which is made apparent in interpretation, lies at the heart of the relationship binding patient to analyst, each of whom listens—although there is a dissymmetry in the way they do so and it is this which makes their exchange possible. The metaphor that S. Freud habitually draws upon to describe listening is that of the telephone receiver, thereby indicating the level of auditory involvement in psychoanalytic listening and the fact that the patient’s unconscious is listened to by the psychoanalyst’s unconscious. Listening provides access to the individual’s alienation via speech, thus passing via the dimension of language and the relation the individual has to his own speech. Psychoanalyst listening is characterized by an intense presence and is attentive to the dialectic of transference and countertransference movements at work. Genuine listening only occurs when one or several changes are generated in both the patient’s and the analyst’s mental functioning.
