ABSTRACT
Leaning on a clinical case, this chapter explores the specificity of analytic listening, informed by the fact that two regimes of language operate side by side and blend in speech: one refers to the semiological plane of lost meanings, the other to the performativity of the uttered statements. By distinguishing between conscious presentation and unconscious representation, Freud manages to elucidate the apparatus through which consciousness as a sense organ comes into contact with the “presentation” of what it cannot “represent” for itself. In so doing, he says a lot more about the listening method than the three skimpy notions he is constantly referred to: the mirror, the telephone, and the surgeon. One of his notations (in “The Future Prospects of Psychoanalytic Therapy”) vitally brings into play the psychic work of the analyst on the basis of what he or she feels: it discusses the patient’s influence on the analyst’s “unconscious feelings” in ways that resonate with the clinical case expounded in this chapter.
