Listening & Speaking

In preparation for today’s talk I had a few brief exchanges with Bryan Plucar about some of the ideas that I have been working on recently and during one of those conversations I spoke about “listening” since I taught a class this past academic year in the PPTP 2-year program about listening and in that context Bryan mentioned a former colleague, someone familiar to both of us, who asked the following question on the topic of listening: “If we follow Freud’s theory of evenly suspended attention then when would we ever intervene!?” My response to Bryan at that moment was: “Well, I guess I’m more of a Freudian than him!” Internally I was also somewhat puzzled by the question since evenly suspended attention is specifically about listening, and not directly related to speaking or intervening. The question seemed to in some way misunderstand that distinction. I took some time to consider how I might actually work to answer the question in a variety of contexts, and my interest was piqued. I realized it could be a very useful starting point for exploring certain ideas, regardless of whether or not there was a primary misunderstanding embedded in the question. Once I started writing, the question itself evolved through a handful of distinct iterations that I heard implied in the original. I don’t know to what degree the new questions are truly contained in the original, and I also may not have gotten the wording of the original question exactly right, but this is how I remembered it, and I decided to keep it intact in that form. I’m trusting my “unconscious memory” with the understanding that today's work becomes more about my own questions and priorities than about this former colleague who shall remain nameless! My main approach to unpacking the question has been: why, in fact, would we be unable to intervene if we practice evenly suspended attention? In other words, what are the obstacles encountered by following this path, regardless of how imaginary I might judge those obstacles to be? This turns out to have been a productive angle which led me to an interesting conclusion. The original question again is: “If we follow Freud’s theory of evenly suspended attention then when would we ever intervene!?” and the following five questions are the best I’ve been able to distill so far from the starting point of my pseudo-imaginary interlocutor:

1. “How can we practice ‘evenly suspended attention’ and still intervene without losing neutrality?”

2. “How can we practice ‘evenly suspended attention’ and still intervene from a position of knowledge?”

3. A pair of somewhat anguished questions: “If I start really listening, how will I be able to stop?! How will I be able to speak?!”

4. “Where do interpretations come from?”

5. “When does listening become speaking?”

I will address these questions today from a Freudian-Lacanian perspective. I chose the title “Listening & Speaking” in part because I am interested in how those two activities interact in clinical practice. In a fundamental and obvious way psychoanalysis consists of the patient speaking and the analyst listening, but the work of analysis would be nearly impossible, and at the very least radically impractical, without a certain kind of speech on the part of the analyst and a certain kind of listening on the part of the patient. In the interest of working from a common reference point I’m going to start with a quote and then put it in relation to other concepts. Here is the definition of “evenly suspended attention” which Freud provides in 1912 in his paper “Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psychoanalysis” (pp.111-112):

The technique ...consists simply in not directing one's notice to anything in particular and in maintaining the same ‘evenly-suspended attention’ ... in the face of all that one hears. In this way we ... avoid a danger which is inseparable from the exercise of deliberate attention. For as soon as anyone deliberately concentrates his attention to a certain degree, he begins to select from the material before him; one point will be fixed in his mind with particular clarity and some other will be correspondingly disregarded, and in making this selection he will be following his expectations or inclinations. This, however, is precisely what must not be done. In making the selection, if he follows his expectations he is in danger of never finding anything but what he already knows; and if he follows his inclinations he will certainly falsify what he may perceive. It must not be forgotten that the things one hears are for the most part things whose meaning is only recognized later on. It will be seen that the rule of giving equal notice to everything is the necessary counterpart to the demand made on the patient that he should communicate everything that occurs to him without criticism or selection. If the doctor behaves otherwise, he is throwing away most of the advantage which results from the patient's obeying the ‘fundamental rule of psychoanalysis’. The rule for the doctor may be expressed: ‘He should withhold all conscious influences from his capacity to attend, and give himself over completely to his “unconscious memory”.’ Or, to put it purely in terms of technique: ‘He should simply listen, and not bother about whether he is keeping anything in mind.’

The basic idea here is pretty clear: “giving equal notice to everything” is a nice formulation of “it’s all grist for the mill” (a familiar psychoanalytic adage) but more specifically he indicates that we should stop choosing consciously, we should not decide what’s important. Interestingly, that framing (stop choosing consciously) could apply just as easily to the analyst’s task or the patient’s task. As Freud indicates, the two rules are counterparts. One of the most important links between the two tasks is the prioritization of the unconscious. This is also supported by Freud’s description, later in the same paper, of the unconscious of the analyst being “turned towards the unconscious of the patient.” Not only do both tasks contain a deprioritization of the intellectual function and an abdication of knowledge, mastery, and power, but they also contain one another. I am suggesting, in other words, that the analyst is doing a kind of free association and the patient is doing a kind of evenly suspended attention. The analyst’s interpretation can be seen as a kind of conditional free association to the material the patient is producing. The patient’s task absolutely includes evenly suspending their attention insofar as they give themselves over to the unconscious and thereby decline to edit their thoughts before speaking. Freud specifically defines free association as granting impartial attention to all thoughts despite their seeming status as irrelevant or meaningless. There is a paradoxical quality to the inter-weaving of the two tasks.

There are certain formulations that are impossible to grasp using intuitive capacities and intellectual tools. Human minds are prone to seeing concepts as binary, and situating Position A as the opposite of Position B and framing them as therefore mutually incompatible. When this is challenged, a common impulse is to try and find some sort of average between the two positions, often called “balance”. Political centrism as a response to the two-party system of government comes to mind as an example. I would suggest that the psychoanalytic perspective is closer to one of transcending binaries. When we are able to drop the reference points that constrain our thinking then we become able to embrace necessary paradoxes and get a closer look at the truth. There are good reasons that patients and analysts both have their own, separate fundamental rules, and yet they are clearly structured as simultaneously separate and not separate. I am a fan of paradox and I like a visual aid (and in this case tactile aid as well). Is anyone familiar with the mobius strip? Please indulge me for a few minutes here, and let’s each make one.

So now we have a paradox in our hands. It is plainly visible that at any one point in traversing the shape there are very clearly two sides, but when you zoom out and take the time to perceive the big picture then it becomes clear that there is only one side here. There are two elements that are very clearly separate and also very clearly not separate. With paradox in mind, alongside the Freud quote, I would like to start exploring the questions hidden inside the original question, which was, just to restate it: “If we follow Freud’s theory of evenly suspended attention then when would we ever intervene!?”

The first evolution of that question is: “How can we practice ‘evenly suspended attention’ and still intervene without losing neutrality?” Although he doesn’t use the word, Freud writes about neutrality in "Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psychoanalysis.” He proposes in that article that we should be “opaque” and show the patient nothing (but what is shown to us). It’s hard not to read this in black and white terms, he does write “nothing” after all. However, any intervention at all would reveal something about the analyst. We could not speak, we could not even choose the moment to be silent or to repeat a patient’s own words back to them. So if Freud’s OPACITY is the whole story, then indeed this appears to put us in something of a bind, but the binary begins to weaken a bit when all of the analyst’s choices are acknowledged to be interventions. So: if there is no way to NOT intervene, then there is no way to be truly opaque, and Freud must mean something else. The context in the “Recommendations” article for the “opaque” quote is Freud advising the analyst against aiming for mutual intimacy with the patient because the analysis would then support defenses, and deprioritize the unconscious, and the analyst would be at great risk of reducing the treatment to an exercise of power and suggestion. To my ear this background significantly collapses the already-weakened binary quality of the directive to be opaque. As an alternative: I much prefer Freud’s formulation of abstinence in “Observations on Transference Love”. The word “abstinence” does not impose the sterility of the word “neutrality” and I read permission in the concept of abstinence to have whatever thoughts and feelings we have about the patient and their material along with the intent to hold back from casting our vote with those thoughts and feelings. Neutrality, on the other hand, implies an absence of opinion that is not necessary with abstinence. Freud also clarifies that abstinence is defined by refusing to meet a specific demand that the patient places in front of us, since once again, meeting that demand would deprioritize the unconscious. This is far more precise and far more useful than “show nothing to the patient” and it doesn’t leave us in a bind. So my answer to the first question is: neutrality is only an obstacle to practicing evenly suspended attention if it is a binary conception of neutrality. If that imaginary form of distance from the patient was required, then Freud’s theory would be truly problematized, but abstinence is a practice entirely consistent with evenly suspended attention.

Lacan, in his paper “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power” writes that it is not only the patient who pays, but that the analyst pays as well. The two pay differently however. According to Lacan the analyst pays with, among other things, “what is essential in his most intimate judgment.” This puts us very much within the game, as opposed to on the sidelines in the imaginary version of neutrality. Why is it so intimate, this judgment? In part it is because we can’t bullshit our patients. Although they know less concrete details about our lives than many others, they also get a side of us unencumbered by everyday concerns and willing to prioritize truth. This frame represents a kind of intimacy that is entirely unwieldy in everyday life. Of course I am speaking in ideals, and nobody is ever perfectly unencumbered by everyday concerns, but the primary intention and permission to set aside certain complications (to whatever extent it is possible to do so) has a profound impact. Assuming that the listening and speaking that take place in sessions are not grounded in the ego, then the analyst is also sharing intimately in the sense of outlining the unconscious behind their interventions. In order to center the truth of the unconscious, the work of psychoanalysis must take the shape of something unknown in the analyst making space for something unknown in the patient. What is known and recognized is much more easily compartmentalized and then dismissed. Intimacy persists when the unknown is sustained.

So we come to the second question: “How can we practice ‘evenly suspended attention’ and still intervene from a position of knowledge?” In other words, if the analyst is truly practicing evenly suspended attention, and therefore not choosing, then how do we know what to say and when to say it? The status of knowledge in psychoanalysis is entirely questionable. In “Wild Psychoanalysis” (1910), Freud writes:

There is an outdated idea... derived from superficial appearances, that the patient suffers from a sort of ignorance, and that if one removes this ignorance by giving him information (about the causal connection of his illness with his life, about his experiences in childhood, and so on) he is bound to recover. [...] If knowledge about the unconscious were as important for the patient as people inexperienced in psychoanalysis imagine, listening to lectures or reading books would be enough to cure him. Such measures, however, have as much influence on the symptoms of nervous illness as a distribution of menus in a time of famine has upon hunger.

Freud makes it clear that knowledge is decidedly useless, or at least a certain species of knowledge. A menu in a famine is a dead end if ever there was one! There is simply nowhere to go from there. Are there other species of knowledge? In French, conveniently, there are two common words for knowledge: CONNAISSANCE and SAVOIR. Connaissance leans towards the conscious, the empirical, and the familiar. This is a kind of knowledge that can be amassed and accumulated and then used to recognize the things we already know from our internalized dictionaries and encyclopedias. This kind of knowledge relies on categorization, identification, and intellectualized understandings. Everyday life gets a lot harder without this kind of knowledge, but it carries the risk of believing in illusions of wholeness and completeness and illusions of pure and precise categorization. Savoir on the other hand is more linked with the unconscious and can tolerate gaps, inconsistencies, and paradoxes. It is a kind of knowledge that the subject does not always know they contain, a shrewdness, a practical wisdom. The term “savoir-faire” translates to “know-how” and offers the potential of a dynamic experience beyond fixed knowledge.

Offering a menu in a time of famine is an attempt to apply conscious knowledge to unconscious problems. This is a confusion between connaissance and savoir. Indeed, there is a know-how that must be present and prior to interpretation to prevent it from being truly “wild” and ungrounded. However, the know-how at stake must allow the analyst to navigate unknown waters. If the analyst recognizes too much too quickly, then they have left the unconscious behind. According to Lacanian theory the analyst must avoid introducing their own signifiers and meanings into the treatment, and instead play with the unconscious knowledge that is revealed primarily in the patient's language via slips, stumbles, pauses, repetitions, jokes, homophonies, internal logical inconsistencies, changes in speed, volume, tone, etc. The unconscious is present in language, although not in forms we can decipher at a glance. If a patient makes a joke or a slip of the tongue, then I know enough to be interested, but not enough to decide what the unconscious is trying to say. An intervention at that moment might be simply to indicate my curiosity by making an interrogative sound, or by repeating the slip, or by playing with the grammar of the joke. In this sense, the know-how required for psychoanalytic interpretation is grounded squarely in the text that the patient provides. 

This is easier said than done since the unconscious is an emergent quality in the session, not a place or a thing, and not a backpack that my patients (or I) could carry around as a possession. It comes into existence only as a gap or as a disruption in the conscious narrative, that could be better said to possess us! My go-to example is the dream: the analyst never has access to a dream, only the particular words the patient chooses to describe that dream at one particular moment. The unconscious is not accessible via the dream itself, only through language. Freud had the habit of asking his patients to describe dreams more than once as a way to better focus on the emergent unconscious in the telling of the dream. In an early seminar, one of Lacan’s students suggested that: “the forgetting of the dream is the obstacle.” Lacan responded that no: “It isn't the obstacle, it's part of the text.” This is a more radical way of saying “it’s all grist for the mill” which Lacan reaches by dropping intuitive and familiar reference points and orienting instead to the linguistic unconscious. I like the word “tangent” to describe this style of working. When our words touch the patient's words only tangentially we do not impose a meaning or rush headlong towards the imagined core of the issue. Instead we imply numerous possibilities and meanings and we rigorously abstain from deciding on behalf of the patient and thereby leave the meaning-making work for the patient to do. Thus the relevant technique is far from arbitrary intuition. The know-how that is needed to operate tangentially is, to a significant degree, a linguistic know-how. My own idiosyncratic orientation to language will be present in my interventions whether I like it or not, but these guidelines keep the patient’s material front and center. It is possible to maintain a position that highlights the patient’s text, and induces the patient to elaborate their thoughts, feelings, and historical reference points around what is being highlighted, but without committing to a specific explanation. Highlighting without explaining perhaps implies a certain kind of knowledge on the part of the analyst but it is entirely contraindicated for the analyst to believe in the knowledge that the patient might ascribe to us.

Jumping in without knowledge is a frightening commitment, but anything less is not psychoanalytic, insofar as it avoids the unconscious. It may be tempting to suggest some sort of moderation in regard to this commitment: “the unconscious as a priority, but only sometimes” or “only in certain situations,” but half-measures like this inevitably amount to resistance on the part of the analyst. The impulse to find an “average” between binary positions is a fetishistic version of moderation, an intellectual answer to a question that exists squarely outside of intellectual territory. The unconscious insists on making its presence known regardless, whereas the ego, although it cannot be eliminated, can at least be undermined. This requires being present, as analysts, in a way that is beyond our conscious control. Unsettling though it may be, it is also quite freeing to let go of the pressure to manage outcomes with knowledge. Neither the patient nor the analyst needs to know any exact coordinates in order for interpretation to take place and for progress to be made. The analyst’s words highlight the patient's words as a way to hold up a prism that destabilizes the ego. The self-image of the patient is fragmented in order to cultivate a less brittle relationship to the unconscious. By working this way the patient’s speech itself is allowed to reach its full potential as the agent of change. After all, as Freud writes in Lay Analysis: “...originally the word was magic—a magical act; and it has retained much of its ancient power...”

The answer to the second question now seems a bit like the first. Knowledge is only an obstacle to practicing in the Freudian tradition if it is the version of knowledge that excludes paradox and clings to specious compartmentalization. There exists a know-how that allows the discourse of the patient to be the focus of the work, and within that discourse prioritizes the unconscious. This way of working eliminates the need for the kind of knowledge that would be truly incompatible with the practice of evenly suspended attention. If we take Freud seriously that the ego is not master in its own house then the practice of listening to the unconscious of the patient with your own unconscious is a practice that absolutely cannot be mastered. The issue of mastery is at stake here to such a degree that it might have been question 2a: “How can we practice ‘evenly suspended attention’ and still intervene from a position of mastery?” If our listening is grounded in the ego, then, as Freud said, we risk hearing only what we already know. If our interventions are grounded in the ego then they will inevitably include attempts at imposing meanings or demanding specific outcomes. If our work is intentionally and thoughtfully grounded in the unconscious, then there is space for the unconscious of the patient to speak. Now I have a question that acts as a kind of rebuttal to the original questions: “How can you practice psychoanalysis without evenly suspended attention and truly avoid coercing your patients, or ignoring your patients, or deceiving yourself?”

The position of the analyst must be radically non-masterful. How could one ever master the magic of language? Every attempt to own or enslave it will only result in it turning to dust and slipping through your fingers. This is another place where paradox emerges. Language is both ours and not ours; another mobius. Language is the same for all of us and also different for all of us. We share a common set of letters and words but we all use them differently. Language is external to us in the sense that it is prior to us and it goes on without us after we die. Language is so alien that it requires a complex and evolving effort to find anything resembling a place within it, and that effort radically shapes us. It is also internal to us insofar as we are all in a unique relationship to it and it is the primary tool we have to express our innermost experiences. Lacan names this paradoxical take on internal and external “Extimacy” (an intimacy that is inseparable from the external). The unconscious has this inside-out (“extimate”) quality as well. We’ve all had the experience of a dream that was mysterious, inexplicable, and disturbing. When the unconscious manifests, it is experienced as radically “Other” and yet so clearly and intimately our own! So far I have followed Freud in describing the unconscious “of” the analyst and the unconscious “of” the patient, but given the “extimate” qualities of the unconscious, this is increasingly untenable. Whose unconscious is speaking? Mythology will allow us to carry this question a little further; I will read a section of the myth of Echo and Narcissus.

Echo still had a body then, and was not merely a voice. But though she was garrulous, she had no other trick of speech than she has now: she can repeat the last words out of many. Juno made her like that, because often when she might have caught the nymphs lying beneath her Jupiter, on the mountain slopes, Echo knowingly held her in long conversations, while the nymphs fled. When Saturnia realised this she said ‘I shall give you less power over that tongue by which I have been deluded, and the briefest ability to speak’ and what she threatened she did. Echo only repeats the last of what is spoken and returns the words she hears. Now when she saw Narcissus wandering through the remote fields, she was inflamed, following him secretly, and the more she followed the closer she burned with fire, no differently than inflammable sulphur, pasted round the tops of torches, catches fire, when a flame is brought near it. O how often she wants to get close to him with seductive words, and call him with soft entreaties! Her nature denies it, and will not let her begin, but she is ready for what it will allow her to do, to wait for sounds, to which she can return words. By chance, the boy, separated from his faithful band of followers, had called out ‘Is anyone here?’ and ‘Here’ Echo replied. He is astonished, and glances everywhere, and shouts in a loud voice ‘Come to me!’ She calls as he calls. He looks back, and no one appearing behind, asks ‘Why do you run from me?’ and receives the same words as he speaks. He stands still, and deceived by the likeness to an answering voice, says ‘Here, let us meet together’. And, never answering to another sound more gladly, Echo replies ‘Together’, and to assist her words comes out of the woods to put her arms around his neck, in longing. He runs from her, and running cries ‘Away with these encircling hands! May I die before what’s mine is yours.’ She answers only ‘What’s mine is yours!’ Scorned, she wanders in the woods and hides her face in shame among the leaves, and from that time on lives in lonely caves. But still her love endures, increased by the sadness of rejection. Her sleepless thoughts waste her sad form, and her body’s strength vanishes into the air. Only her bones and the sound of her voice are left. Her voice remains, her bones, they say, were changed to shapes of stone. She hides in the woods, no longer to be seen on the hills, but to be heard by everyone. It is sound that lives in her.

In the story of Echo we can hear the anguish of question number three: “If I start really listening, how will I be able to stop?! How will I be able to speak?!” Poor Echo has been thrown into the role of listener, with no way out. She manages to communicate something of her own using the words of Narcissus, and this is what marks her position as psychoanalytic. Not only is her speech inexorably linked to the speech of the other, but she is listening in a way that is disengaged from the speaker's conscious narrative. She uses his words to highlight a meaning he doesn’t intend. The difference is that she truly has no choice but to listen, because otherwise she could not speak at all. Echo’s words are excruciatingly (both) her own and not her own. For the psychoanalyst there is no simple answer to question number three. In some ways we never stop listening. Every time the analyst hears their spouse or their child or their parents speak, they are at risk of listening analytically! Intervention is a different story of course; if those others in the analyst’s life make a slip of the tongue, it would be difficult to justify a position from which to provide an interpretation. In contrast to the listening we do in our offices, though, there may perhaps be some comfort in ignorance when we listen to our families. Insofar as we occupy the position of the psychoanalyst though, we must maintain a strict relation to the truth. We can never find comfort in ignorance and rest on our laurels when listening to our patients. When speaking, likewise, as Freud writes (Observations on Transference Love); “psycho-analytic treatment is founded on truthfulness”. We intervene and interpret only within the limits of our listening, like Echo.

So my answer to question three is something on the order of “Good question!” On some level the concerns in question three are well-founded! After all, according to Lacan, anguish is the only affect that does not lie. If we practice evenly suspended attention we really do lose the ability to listen and speak in certain ways, but the kind of speech we lose access to is not the kind we need for our work. No psychoanalyst is working 24 hours a day, and we all have lives outside the office. In small towns or cities, as I’m sure you know, we are likely to eventually run into our patients, and in psychoanalytic communities likewise, dual relationships are inevitable. One way to address this is to take seriously the concept behind the phrase: “to occupy the position of the psychoanalyst.” I perform the analytic function every time I’m with a patient, and they develop a relationship with that function. I bring myself to that task with humor, creativity, and my most “intimate judgment” but it is inevitably a position that I occupy at certain times and not at others. If I happen to be at a party when my analyst is singing karaoke, whatever the reason, however I got there, well.... then at that moment she is certainly not my analyst. Thus there is no way to truly “BE” a psychoanalyst, it is only a chair we sit in at given moments, a position we can aim to occupy at certain times. 

The issue of time and timing is increasingly insistent. In the original question I remember hearing “When” (would we ever intervene) and so far the questions I extracted have asked “How” do we intervene without losing neutrality or losing knowledge, but, especially with question number three, I might just as well have asked “When will I be able to stop listening?” and “When will I be able to speak?” The answer is often simply “NOT YET.” As Freud writes in the quote I read earlier: “...the things one hears are for the most part things whose meaning is only recognized later on...” and this already begins to define a specific relation to time. If we’re using the unconscious as the foundation, then we cannot pretend to know ahead of time the impact of our interventions. The analyst formulates their responses according to specific conditions, and then gives it their best shot, and then pays attention to what happens next. The unconscious operates in a “timeless” manner in terms of mixing past and present, but it is not without structure, and that structure obeys logical (if perhaps not chronological) sequence. Transference comes before interpretation. The analytic position requires patience. Time is also directly related to the möbius strip. Taken only synchronically, at any one “moment” of its traversal, it appears to have two sides, but when time is added to the equation, diachronically, we zoom out and it becomes clear that there is only one single side. Words also take time: the meaning of a sentence only becomes clear after the final word is … sung? Screamed? Stuttered? Spoken? This is simply the nature of language. Narcissus is best known for falling in love with his own reflection, so why does he not fall in love with his own words? It may have something to do with the fundamental differences between language and image. It is at the level of the image, or the “snapshot” so to speak, that the möbius has two sides. Images present all at once, and offer a semblance of wholeness, while words take time and point to lack. We only need words because we lack things. If an intervention does not take time into account, then it can never reach the status of an interpretation.

The fourth question is: “Where do interpretations come from?” and to a significant degree I have already been answering this question along the way. For Freud, although he does not provide a fundamental rule in this regard, we can safely say that interpretations must be rooted in the unconscious and in the text of the patient’s speech. Lacan agrees, and makes certain features of Freud’s theory more explicit. Lacan described his work as a return to Freud, although it might be more honest to describe it as an evolution of Freud’s work. Freud was already deeply invested in language, so in this sense Lacan is working with material that was already present in Freud’s work. Sticking with his text, so to speak. Freud’s investments in language are entirely legible in the opening 5 pages of “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life” where he details the experience of forgetting as a formation of the unconscious, but not just any unconscious, a profoundly linguistic unconscious. Lacan’s explicit emphasis on linguistics is in harmony with Freud’s “evenly suspended attention” but not identical to it. Language and the unconscious are necessary, but are they sufficient as a foundation for interpretations? Lacan offers a concept called The Desire of The Analyst as a theoretical avenue to address, among other things, the source of interpretations. He writes (S.11) that: “The analyst's desire is not a pure desire. It is a desire to obtain absolute difference.” It is impure in the sense that it is not a desire for one outcome, one expression, one thing. The analyst’s desire points unequivocally towards what makes each patient unique, the ways this patient is different from all the others, particularly on the level of speech. A given word might have crucial associations for one patient and be nearly empty for the next patient. Abstinence amounts to an acknowledgement of difference, and a basic respect for difference. I do not agree with theories that prioritize sameness. For example: the famous Harry Stack Sullivan quote: “All of us are much more human than otherwise”. I like the reformulation by Deborah Luepnitz: “All of us are much more Otherwise...” because it does not trample on the unknowability of the unconscious. You can’t really know what it’s like to be in someone else’s shoes and Lacan is the analyst whose work takes on this idea more rigorously than any other.

Prioritizing sameness also requires recourse to an imaginary reference point of normality and then inevitably falls into the trap of comparison and related violence. There is always a risk that when I look for the other I will see mostly myself, that the mirror will fall between me and the patient, but not facing the patient! One way to mitigate this danger is with the insistence on the unknown of difference. I am different from you, and I am different from myself. When the basic premise of psychoanalysis is honored, then I am as split by the unconscious as every other neurotic and I no longer need to get caught up in the quagmire of knowing. When I am willing to lose knowledge, then the session cracks wide open and I can hear so much more of the patient. The less there is to recognize in the mirror, as in the clinic, the more likely I am to be surprised, and the less likely I am to impose my own stale templates. Insofar as the work meets these conditions it requires the analyst to lean into existential discomfort and to work towards knowing with the understanding that it will never be reached.

This way of listening respects the splits in the subjectivity of the patient and simultaneously calls attention to those splits. It requires a delicate attention to power dynamics, specifically through the rejection of the tradition of suggestion. It may not always be perceived as delicate by the patient, however. The feeling a patient has about their analyst is important in terms of what it says about transference, but as a point of orientation it will only get in the way if the analyst is trying to manage it ahead of time. Lacan said (1975 Yale Lecture) that: “Analytic interpretation is not intended to be understood; it is intended to make waves. Thus, one must not be too heavy-handed about it, and often it is better to remain silent; only: it must be a choice.”

Here we can read both the careful and the forceful sides of the technique, and how they call for attention to be paid to the factor of time. The commitment to the unknown does not mean that we “make waves” at all times, or at all costs. For example: when the patient is in crisis, I do not aim for disruption. There is no need, it’s already present! There is a default intention to make waves and it simply means that we don’t resort to some other version of treatment when the going gets complicated. Likewise, I do not aim for disruption or waves before I have some preliminary familiarity with the landscape. The unconscious is a priority from the beginning in terms of my listening, but the relationship between the unconscious and my speaking changes during the treatment. In the beginning there is mostly listening. The analyst who speaks too directly about his emerging understandings will risk getting patients stuck in treatment, as they adapt to receiving suggestions that explain too much. Instead the analyst can offer interpretations that re-orient the patient to something of their own unconscious savoir.

We’ve arrived at the fifth and final question: “When does listening become speaking?” and my answer is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a möbius. Listening and speaking are not exactly separate in the first place. My thesis is that the relationship between them (in the context of the analytic session) is that of the “two” sides of the mobius, assuming that the work is grounded in the desire of the analyst. Without abstinence, listening and speaking diverge drastically and become increasingly transactional and binary. Of course they are fundamentally separate from a certain perspective, but in this work there is a paradoxical convergence. If the text at stake is the text of the patient and if the analyst is committed to the unconscious and to abstinence, then the distinction between listening and speaking becomes less and less relevant. By the way, this idea of listening and speaking forming a mobius is not a Lacanian idea insofar as he never said it. It is, of course, a Lacanian idea in the sense that it relies on his theory. The idea is an effort on my part to create a small, new piece of theory with the tools and traditions I’ve encountered. Aside from this and my use of the word “tangent” the material I have offered today is almost entirely my interpretation of concepts Freud and Lacan have already proposed. But, so, the moment of receptiveness, the act of allowing the patient's words to resonate and evolve in the mind of the analyst is virtually equivalent, under the conditions discussed, to the moment of intervention and echo. Listening becomes speaking when the analyst has enough trust in unconscious memory to speak freely to the patient, within the bounds of un-knowing. Speaking can be a way of listening and listening can be a way of speaking.

In the interest of tangentiality I will end with a joke. I heard this joke from my first teacher in the field, her name is Stefanie Teitelbaum (apologies if you’ve heard this one before, I don’t get a lot of opportunities to tell it): What’s the difference between a Freudian analysis and a Kleinian analysis? In the Freudian analysis you don’t need an analyst and in the Kleinian analysis you don’t need a patient.