ABSTRACT
In psychoanalytic psychotherapy the patient is the dynamic, active agent. He is the one who is telling and retelling his story, transferring feelings onto his therapist and dramatizing the inner psychodynamics of self in the clinical setting. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy depends as much upon the structure of the relationship between the therapist and the patient as upon anything else. The challenge for the therapist of free floating attentiveness or free floating listening is doubly two-fold. First, the therapist has to listen to everything that the patient is saying. Secondly, and just as importantly, he has to attend to everything that is going on in his own mind as well–the thoughts, associations and even feelings which are inevitably a part of the therapist's experience of the patient. The therapist, therefore, has a primary responsibility to put the patient at ease so as to make talking possible.
