ABSTRACT
This chapter address the question of what does it mean to approach the heart of psychoanalytic work? The peculiar biblical combination of a “hearing heart”—has captured the imagination and thinking and carved out a space in the clinical understanding over many years. The chapter describes the importance, even the necessity, of the analyst’s “hearing heart”—hearing, listening, and understanding with one’s heart—in the process of containing. It shows “hearing heart” as an essential part of the analyst’s increased receptive capacity, and emphasize the crucial necessity of the analyst’s openness of heart. And adding Tustin’s idea of “broken-heartedness,” it is the analyst/therapist’s heart that hears and “experiences again and again the heart-break which is at the centre of human existence,” especially when the patient’s transmission is unthinkably broken. Worlds of meaning and clinical experience converge at the heart’s center of psychoanalytic work.
