A Comparison of Archaeological and Empathic Modes of Listening

Abstract

A Comparison of Archaeological and Empathic Modes of Listening Lawrence Josephs, Ph.D. ARCHAEOLOGICAL LISTENING COULD be defined as a manner of listening in which the analyst attempts to derive the unconscious meaning (latent content) of the patient's communications through a process of deciphering the manifest content. The essence of archaeological listening was articulated by Freud (1900) in his method of dream interpretation, which came to serve as a prototype for the interpretation of all aspects of subjective experience, since remembered dreams, like any other form of conscious mentation, were thought to reflect a compromise between the conflicting and unconscious forces within the mind. In this model, conscious experience was presumed to be but a pale reflection of unconscious activity. The unconscious is the true psychical reality; in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely presented by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the communications of our sense organs (Freud, 1900p. 613). The archaeological metaphor is apropos in terms of the topographic model, in that unconscious activity reflects a regression (i.e. a return to the past) when compared with conscious mentation. Freud described three types of regression that may be discerned in unconscious activity: (a) topographical regression, in the sense of the schematic picture of the Ψ-systems which we have explained above; (b) temporal regression, in so far as what is in question is a harking back to older psychical structures; and (c) formal regression, where primitive methods of expression and representation take the place of the usual ones (1900p. 548). In temporal regression, a dream or, for that matter, any other