Facets of Psychoanalytic Listening

Jeffrey L. Eaton is a graduate and faculty member of the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, a member of the IPA, and a Board-Certified Psychoanalyst. He received the Frances Tustin Memorial Lecture Prize in 2006. He works in private practice in Seattle, USA.

‘This is a very beautiful and profound book. Its clinical reach is long and wide, to the far side of extreme psychopathology… A gift and an uplift from an extraordinary teacher.’Anne Alvarez, author of A Thinking Heart‘This book probes the experience of listening on many levels, from many different angles… Eaton is a close reader of Bion and his appreciation of Bion’s work flashes through every chapter. One feels the expression of his personal experience of analytic listening coming through and opening new pathways for contact and creativity.’Michael Eigen, PhD, author of The Challenge of Being Human.‘Facets of Listening is a major contribution to contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice. Eaton writes with a language that is at once precise and evocative, anchoring the ineffable in the immediacy of the clinical encounter. A clear thinker with a gift for coherent articulation, he is devoted to psychoanalytic listening... and always attuned to clinical life.’Avner Bergstein, author of Bion and Meltzer's Expeditions into Unmapped Mental Life.‘Facets of Listening is a book on the cutting edge of psychoanalytic thinking worldwide. The book is beautifully written, profound in its message, and a unique contribution to psychoanalytic practice and pedagogy. Eaton’s voice is authentic and compelling. He has an exceptional ability to describe primal analytic experiences in ordinary language. He avoids psychoanalytic jargon and instead describes experience in evocative ways with a style and illustrative technique that uses metaphors and compelling stories to make complex ideas understandable. Eaton gives his reader an experience of ‘feel thinking’, a concept from Bion that he demonstrates. In doing so, he enables us to notice that which we may not have noticed before. I highly recommend this book.’Judy K Eekhoff PhD, author of Bion and Primitive Mental States‘Jeff Eaton is one of the most creative and open exponents of the art of depth psychoanalytic listening. The essays gathered here represent a significant continuation and expansion of the thinking that he presented in his first book, A Fruitful Harvest: Essays after Bion. That is, they are genuinely ‘essais` - attempts not at completion but at further creative development. These ‘attempts’ evolve in two directions: one is that they involve the elaboration, not of ‘meaning’ or thinking but of what Bion called ‘feel-thinking’ as the basis for psychoanalytic action and attention. Centrally, this means assuming the responsibility of not simply listening to the other/patient but also equally as Bion put it “listening to yourself listening”. The second direction is expansion of his learning and understanding beyond the strict boundaries of psychoanalysis into the broad fields of Buddhism, meditation and ‘the suchness of experience’. His aim, richly described and realized, is to become, as a writer, “a feel-thinker”, one who “finds the words to express what experience is”. For psychoanalysis to survive and develop, this is a vital work, richly articulated. I cannot recommend it too highly.’Dr Roger Bacon, author of Psychoanalysis in the Dark.

• Foreword: Loray Daws Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Listening as an Improbable Conversation 2. Listening with a Hearing Heart 3. Listening to a Floor for Experience 4. From Screaming to Dreaming 5. From Emotion to Evolution 6. Gathering the Data of a Session: Some Tasks of Listening 7. Listening to a Felt-Self 8. Welcoming Suchness 9. A Matrix of Contact: Toward A Listening Grid 10. Facets of Faith 11. Listening as an Open Gate