Deepening Psychoanalytic Listening: The Marriage of Buddha and Freud

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.