Routledge Creative Listening and the Psychoanalytic Process: Sensibility, Engagement and Envisioning

Contemporary psychoanalytic thinking about the interdependence of subjectivity and intersubjectivity has reenvisioned the analytic process, and with it the very nature of creative and engaged psychoanalytic listening. Yet few systematic writings on psychoanalytic listening or technique provide comprehensive instruction that would prepare the analyst for the kind of analytic listening needed to participate imaginatively in this sort of intersubjective experience.Offering a short course in analytic listening, Creative Listening and the Psychoanalytic Process provides a guide for the clinical uses of imaginative literature. Outside the psychoanalytic literature, extraordinary pieces of imaginative literature exist that provide the kind of experience in analytic listening that can guide clinicians in their work with patients. Certain works of fiction create textured, sensory worlds in which complex characters possessing shifting states of consciousness live within fluid emotional atmospheres. In this book, Fred Griffin demonstrates that by entering the worlds that original writers create in their texts, the psychoanalytic therapist will learn to attend more closely to varying emotional states that generate nuanced, multidimensional views of the analysand’s internal and relational worlds. He illustrates how these works capture more fully the sensory experience encountered by psychoanalysts when taking in what the patient communicates within the analytic space. Creative Listening and the Psychoanalytic Process presents case material alongside selected passages from works of fiction written by a range of creative writers, each of which stimulates analytic sensibility about this clinical experience. A conceptual framework is provided that makes these and other original works of fiction more accessible for these purposes. This book will be essential reading for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as professors and graduate students studying psychoanalysis and literature. It will also appeal to literary scholars and those teaching and practicing in the field of narrative medicine. Review "This is a most welcome book in which Fred Griffin develops the idea of creative listening in the experience of reading literature and in the experience of listening with patients. He beautifully captures the subtle shifts in qualities of consciousness he finds in the work of Woolf, Faulkner, and Proust; he goes on to make use of his ear for such shifts in heightening his receptivity to subtle, but crucially important alterations in states of consciousness in the analytic setting. Griffin guides the reader patiently and respectfully through the texts he discusses and through the vivid analytic experiences he presents. In this book, the pleasure and demands of reading literature and the pleasure and demands of analytic work are brought into lively conversation with one another, each enriching the other. This book is a major contribution to psychoanalysis in that it provides an original way of making use of imaginative writing in the development not only of the analyst’s ear for the expressiveness of language, but also in the development of the analyst’s emotional receptivity to what is occurring in the analytic setting."-Thomas Ogden, M. D., author of Creative Readings: Essays on Seminal Analytic Works and The Parts Left Out: A Novel. "This is one of the most creative books to appear in many years. Fred Griffin has forged a dialogue between psychoanalysis and imaginative literature that enhances the depth and sensitivity of our analytic listening in invaluable ways. There are many books on psychoanalytic technique, but few can match this wonderful book in rendering the art of psychoanalysis. Dr. Griffin has given us a true treasure. This is a work that no analytic therapist should be without."-Theodore J. Jacobs, M.D., author of The Use of the Self: Countertransference and Communication in the Analytic S