Analytic listening and practice

Abstract

An analyst works by means of his affective availability and of what, for convenience, we call listening. In our present clinical practice, much more is demanded from him: his symbolizing potential, not only to recover what exists, but also to produce what never was there. Predominant demand for analysis nowadays is based on intense suffering, which, for the analyst, implies challenges where his technical position must be modified. Listening is the pre-requisite for an interpretation that is safe from a pre-established, frozen, knowledge, a simple «application» of metapsychology. Would anyone admit that he «applies» theory in his clinical work?
However, the unique history is frequently replaced by the universal. Only by defeating this formal compliance with the fundamental concepts (Oedipus, narcissism, castration, drive, wish) can we succeed in understanding each clinical phenomenon. Only in this way, will listening support the word of the patient. How do we work? The broadest-minded will distinguish themselves
by their practice and / or their productions. The others will distinguish themselves by their emblems, by their regional codes of law, their dialects and their belonging to a parish church. When theories are frozen to preserve identity, they are only «passwords».
Let us not say, not actually meaning it, that the analytic process is hypercomplex. Let us work. Let us show and demonstrate the entanglement of actions, of interactions, of retroactions. There appear new reductionisms every day because there appear new complexities every day. A complex form of thinking expands into a complex form of behaving.

To sum up, my listening is not a simple auditory aptitude, and different schools favour different notions and practices. Adaptation, in North American analysis; transmuting internalization, in Kohut; binding historization through erotic work, in Piera Aulagnier; establishing a new relationship between radical imagination and the reflexive subject, in Castoriadis; working through schizoparanoid anxieties and gaining access to the depressive position, in Klein; subjective removal and piecing the phantom, in Lacan; underground work of symbolization, in Laplanche. Winnicott, closer to Freud, chooses to create a transitional space that boosts playing and illusion.
The goal of my psychoanalysis is to modify intersystem relationships. I understand that for modifications of the structure to occur, a dynamic and economic transformation has to take place, via analysis, in the relationships between the ego and the id, the superego and external reality.