Listening in Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Analysands continuously give signs of feeling ambivalent toward their analysts and their being in analysis at all. Some of them repress negative side of this am bivalence; others, trying to avoid their positive feelings of love, gratitude, or desire, project negative feelings onto their analysts and then feel unwanted, despised, or hated. I will be focusing on ambivalence in psychoanalytic situation and rela tionship as a way to respond to Charon's essay. It seems that, in their ambivalence, analysands hope simultaneously to get rid of their problems and to hang on to them. Taking negative, they fear to try for change; in keeping with their life-historical stories, they feel hopeless about ever finding someone who will listen to them in a way that is reliably empathetic rather than self-interested, exploitative, or rejecting. When Rita Charon refers to health worker's making room within self for patient's story, she is, among other things, pointing to empathetic listening for ambivalence. The analyst, too, is required to listen in this way. There is no better way to develop an atmosphere of trust and safety; that is, one in which an analysand might muster hope, dare to try to turn in ward, and accept and ultimately acknowledge openly another person's help in work ing toward a better life than she or he has been living. Being alert and responsive to ambivalence, analysts do not take at face value what they hear from analysands (or from their students); rather, they listen for chorus of mixed voices relaying analysand's life stories and present experiences. In one respect, they listen in line with what Paul Ricouer has referred to as the hermeneutics of suspicion. Here, suspicion implies not hostile surveillance but