ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how the analyst attends to the material offered by the patient. Besides the associations and affects one goes through while listening to the patient, a highly informative and technically useful subjective experience is constituted by feeling impelled to do something. Follow-up work with the patient and with oneself is essential and informative in both instances. Sigmund Freud coined the term “counter-transference” to describe the feelings generated in the analyst “as a result of the patient’s influence on his unconscious”. The chapter suggests that, in order to grasp the totality of his experience, the practising analyst has to listen carefully to his associations, emotions, impulses, and actions. As the patient begins to talk and the session gets underway, the analyst leans back and listens carefully to the patient’s associations, tries to make sense of his long and short silences, and keeps an eye on his subtle and gross motor activity.
