Ways of Hearing: Getting Inside Psychoanalysis

Abstract

In this essay, I venture into the inside of psychoanalysis. John Berger wrote the book Ways of Seeing in June of 1972. Twelve books later, in The Shape of a Pocket, I discovered an extraordinary likeness between Berger's description of the relationship of the artist and model that yields an authentic painting, and the relationship of the analyst and patient that yields an authentic psychoanalysis. Using Berger's terms, I will describe how, if the painter and analyst have the nerve to be receptive enough, an “encounter” will emerge in a “place” for the “face” of that encounter to show itself—the signature of a true “collaboration.”

I will describe how tuning into the unconsciously transmitted analytic soundtracks—by way of the narrative derivatives and raw emotional experiences of the patient and analyst, the analyst's more elaborated reveries, emotional states, bodily experiences and activities, and the patient's reverberating text—creates the possibility for “welcoming the absent” encounters in the field of unconscious emotional experience. Once these encounters are registered by the analyst, they can be relegated useable by giving them form through the language of interpretation. If these interpretations ring true to the patient, and the patient wishes to be heard, then a collaborative partnership can take shape, in which a pocket of resistance can emerge and allow the dreamwork of analysis to begin.