In his 1912 paper on technique, Freud’s directive was“Simply listen.” Listening psychoanalytically is anything but simple. Freud wanted to reach below the surface of everyday speech and listen to an older and deeper language: the language of the unconscious. We will study three areas of listening: Listening to Transference, Listening to Countertransference, and Analyst’s Reverie. By way of analytic and creative writers we’ll explore ways that we perceive and listen to unconscious processes, how our capacity to hear these communications lead us to a greater range and depth of perception, and how psychoanalytic listening is a generative and transforming experience.

Jeanne C. Harasemovitch, LCSW, is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Berkeley. A member and faculty at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, she teaches for their training and outreach programs with an emphasis on psychoanalysis as a creative process. She is a member of the editorial board of fort da, where she has published on psychoanalysis and the arts. She supervises for the Wright and Access Institutes and provides psychoanalytic consultation and study groups privately.