Evenly Suspended Attention
Freud describes psychoanalytic listening as that of “evenly suspended attention.” This is a kind of “free floating” awareness that is ambient as opposed to focused: while you may be aware of strong feelings aroused in you by the patient, the practice is not to act upon these feelings, but to let them wash over you and acknowledge them as part of the room. The room (or frame) of the psychoanalytic treatment is the office itself, plus fifty minutes of time and the agreement that the patient, lying down or seated, will say anything at all. The analyst’s attention is evenly suspended in this room. They are aware of all sense-impressions, feelings, biases, reveries, and the meaning and or non-meaning in the speech of the analyst. The point is to remain open, to accept all these and yet to make no decision upon them. The point is non-judgment. Interpretation, while inevitable, is a forgone conclusion, merely another feature of the room. Some argue that such attention is occult because of the tacit assumption that much of what is being communicated is telepathic; the patient is projecting these visions and these feelings into the analyst. The open-ended sensitivity developed in this stance is more the kind of attention you might have at a séance, in an art-practice, or in Zen meditation rather than the antiseptic and “objective” observation of the scientific laboratory.
Several Circles, 1926, Kandinsky
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