Extending the Psychoanalytic Listening Paradigm: Listening with all the Senses

Extending the Psychoanalytic Listening Paradigm: Listening with all the Senses guides readers through the nuances of non-verbal communication in the analytic setting. Presenting a dialogue between three eminent psychoanalysts, this book is made up of numerous case studies and commentaries on patients presenting difficulties with symbolisation, including borderline and primitive mental states. Each analyst presents a different aspect of psychoanalytic listening – body, action, and speech – from a different perspective, before the three come together to analyse these situations. The authors highlight the importance of listening as a device for the analyst, showing how it is used not only to make the repressed emerge, to repair what is traumatic and to activate the continuity of the self, but also as a contribution to constructing the subject throughout the sequence of interactions with the other-than-self. The authors propose an extension of the concept of the unconscious and of the tools used by the analyst in the consulting room: the unconscious states not yet verbalised of the first experiences of psychic life are reached through listening to communications that use other sensory communication channels outside of the verbal. Bookended by a preface from Stefano Bolognini and an afterword from Francesco Barale, this accessible yet thorough volume is a vital tool for any psychoanalyst or psychotherapist.

Table of Contents:
Stefano Bolognini PREFACE Tiziana Bastianini 1. "PSYCHIC INTENSITIES": LISTENING TO HETEROGENEOUS FORMS OF EMERGENCE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS "Listening with all the senses" (Tiziana Bastianini) "Listening with all the senses”: metapsychologically widening; the paradigm of psychoanalytic listening; Catching the currents of the unconscious Brief reflections on the topic of symbolisation at the origin of the non-represented Listening to the negative: the analytic couple’s implications for the psychic economy Listening to forms of unconscious intersubjective construction Semiotic gestures: “The murmur of things” A fundamental question: “Investigating the caesura” Listening to the excess: “That nothing, that too much.” A different reflection on the dimensions of the traumatic The body knows: brief clinical reflections “Dissociated” places of the mind: flight when there is nowhere to flee to Listening to “the blue note”: reflections on the Covid period 2. Embodied unconsciouses: in the beginning was action (Benedetta Guerrini Degl’Innocenti) Daniel and the edge of chaos The Day After: looking oneself in the face so as not to lose oneself Giving form to the object Analytic device and symbolic transformation: giving form to the formless Giving psychic form to the beginnings of experience From action to representation In the beginning there was action The work of the psyche-soma: from intercorporeality to communication in speech Giulia: a powerful and irresistible drive to represent Concluding 3. Openings for listening to words (Anna Ferruta) Ouverture – A clearing in the forest of symbols Absolute listening ‘not greedy’ for meanings The sonic material of island-words The forms of presence of the object that listens Intensity of the word Condensation of the word Power of the ‘magic’ word The word as a way out of the subject’s ‘enigmatic reserve’ Listening to silence Silence is someone who listens Zones of silence: suffering denied Philìa: a sibling bond An envelope of words: the psychic skin The skin as a psychic function that holds the self together The skin as a psychic function that communicates with the other-than-self Immersed in a bath of words AFTERWORD. On some aspects of contemporary psychoanalysis: beyond interpretation? (Francesco Barale) Transference Associativity and listening The Device and the setting Symbolisation and the object’s “symbolising function” Factors of transformation (cure) Intrapsychic and interpsychic Problems and questions

About the Author :
Tiziana Bastianini is a psychologist, psychoanalyst, and Training and Supervising analyst for the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and IPA. She has worked with young adults in a mental health service, and previously worked in psychiatric clinics. She lives and works in Rome, Italy. Anna Ferruta is a psychologist, psychoanalyst and Training and Supervising analyst for the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and IPA. She is a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. She specialises in serious diseases and primitive mental functioning, and is a consultant and supervisor in psychiatric institutions and research centres. She lives and works in Milan, Italy. Benedetta Guerrini Degl’Innocenti is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and Training and Supervising analyst for the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and IPA. She is a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Her areas of interest and research are psychoanalytic work with unrepresented mental states, transgenerational issues related to the body and the transmission of psychoanalysis. She lives and works in Florence, Italy.

Review :
‘In this book we find an ideal continuation of Bion's Italian Seminars, namely a book that tends to develop the capacity to feel and think with all our senses, allowing for the development of what will be conveyed in the narrative - something whose motto will be to extend the realm of thinkability to its furthest limits. It oscillates between Bion's A Memoire of the Future and Taming Wild Thoughts in a dreamlike dance between threads that are in the process of being woven, between the extensions of the senses and the ability to give word to embryonic states and to the narrative knots and their characters, where the narrative plot is coupled to the sensory.’ Antonino Ferro Past President of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, Author of “In the Analyst's Consulting Room”, Sigourney Award Winner ‘It is an experiential immersion in the preverbal, in the atmospheres, temperatures, rhythms, and the bodily equivalents not recognised as such, but as they are experienced in a shared return […] The Authors’ writings introduce us into the experience of their inner laboratories, making us appreciate their atmospheres, rhythms, and styles, and the astuteness and elegance of their research. The illustrative, essential and illuminating clinical parts depict the various stories and situations with the trusty brushstrokes of the expert analyst, and provide the reader with numerous sensations of surprise at the depth of understanding they are able to instil.’ From the Foreward by Stefano Bolognini, Past President of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, Past President of the International Psychoanalytic Association, Chair of the IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis