Deepening psychoanalytic listening: the marriage of Buddha and Freud.

Full Abstract

Freud (1912) delineated the ideal state of mind for therapists to listen, what he called "evenly hovering" or "evenly suspended attention." No one has ever offered positive recommendations for how to cultivate this elusive yet eminently trainable state of mind. This leaves an important gap in training and technique. What Buddhism terms meditation-non-judgmental attention to what is happening moment-to-moment-cultivates exactly the extraordinary, yet accessible, state of mind Freud was depicting. But genuine analytic listening requires one other quality: the capacity to decode or translate what we hear on the latent and metaphoric level-which meditation does not do. This is a crucial weakness of meditation. In this chapter I will draw on the best of the Western psychoanalytic and Eastern meditative traditions to illuminate how therapists could use meditation to cultivate "evenly hovering attention" and how a psychoanalytic understanding of the language and logic of the unconscious complements and enriches meditative attention.

Author information

Author/s: Rubin, Jeffrey B (JB);

Affiliation: Westchester Institute for Training in Psychoanalysis, USA. jeffreyrubin(-atsign-)optonline.net

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Biography; Historical Article; Journal Article; Review

Journal: American journal of psychoanalysis (Am J Psychoanal), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2009-Jun; vol 69 (issue 2) : pp 93-105

Dates: Created 2009/06/18; Completed 2009/08/21;

PMID: 19536176, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 8/21/2009, IMS Date: )

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

External Links for this article
(including full text providers, if available):

Click Electronic Full-text Provider Links to see options for finding the electronic full text links to this article. Note there may be a subscription or fee required for access to the full text. See our FAQ for information on finding FREE full text articles.

This article may also be located in paper journal collections available in many libraries. Use the Journal and Publication Information above to find the full article.