Psychoanalytic Listening Quotes

“Perhaps the “objective” (more so) and “intersubjective” (less so) models of listening constitute what Killingmo (1989) has called “sceptical listening” and the “empathic” and “subjective” forms of listening might constitute what he has termed “credulous” listening. “Credulous listening” focuses upon what the patient is saying, “sceptical listening”on how the patient is saying what he is saying. The analyst who is listening credulously pays great attention to the patient’s preoccupation and complaints; he finds them meaningful in their own right and is not in a rush to unmask their meanings. The analyst who is listening sceptically is attuned to what is hidden behind the patient’s manifest content; he eschews what is on the surface and wishes both the parties in the clinical situation to delve deeper.”
― Salman Akhtar, Psychoanalytic Listening

“While starting out as a developmental process parallel to introjection, projective identification can come to serve many defensive purposes. These include attempted fusion with external objects to avoid the existential burden of separateness, extrusion of bad internal objects that cause persecutory anxieties, and preservation of endangered good aspects of the self by depositing them into others.”
― Salman Akhtar, Psychoanalytic Listening