ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book suggests that it was the Romantic work of art itself that laid the foundation for analytic receptiveness, through the listening, responsive, 'not-knowing' state it could invite and require in the reader or viewer. Works of art and literature that elicited and demanded a kind of 'receptive misunderstanding' began to appear in abundance in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe. Baudelaire's verse and prose drew on an earlier Romanticism and herald modernism. Romanticism repeatedly asserted the artist's and the viewer's right to trust his or her own senses and judgements, and in this it bequeathed something of importance for the working analyst. The book discusses some salient and representative statements of the analytic attitude from Sigmund Freud onwards, and aims to convey a sense of the nuanced multiplicity of ways in which analytic listening has been evoked and problematised.
