ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the use and impact of listening/experiencing perspectives in analytic group psychotherapy and how people came to value group therapy. The chapter addresses the emergence of the conceptualization of the empathic listening mode of perception within its historical context and the major questions, misunderstandings, and issues surrounding it. The chapter argues that analyst's use of an overriding empathic perspective, combined with the frequent use of other-centered and analyst's self listening perspectives enhances the use of the analyst's subjectivity, increasing the range of listening and responding to facilitate the psychoanalytic process and development of patients in individual and group analytic therapy. The clinical vignette illustrates the natural activation and oscillation and conscious selective use of the three listening perspectives that facilitate exploration, understanding, and explanation of a group interaction that, in this instance, entailed intense threat, denigration, and aggression. The paradigm change from positivistic to relativistic science, Kohut, updated psychoanalytic epistemology in re-conceptualizing its method of observation.
