ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that in the literature subsequent to Sigmund Freud’s original ideas about the topic, psychoanalytic listening has been described in four major ways. These include objective listening, subjective listening, empathic listening, and inter-subjective listening. Psychoanalytic contributors who came after Freud thus found their own solutions to these dilemmas and added further nuances to the manner in which an analyst listens to the patient’s communication. Freud also made a number of remarks about the analyst’s manner of listening and what exactly it is that he ought to be attuned towards in his attention. Freud exhorted the prospective analyst to “not tolerate any resistances in him”, undergo an analysis himself, and “continue the analytic examination of his personality in the form of a self-analysis”. P. Gray’s suggested method of listening hones in on the moment-to-moment shifts of direction, emphasis, and nuance in the stream of the patient’s associations.
