Evenly Suspended Attention
Freud describes psychoanalytic listening as that of “evenly suspended attention.” This is a kind of “free floating” awareness that is ambient as opposed to focused: while you may be aware of strong feelings aroused in you by the patient, the practice is not to act upon these feelings, but to let them wash over you and acknowledge them as part of the room. The room (or frame) of the psychoanalytic treatment is the office itself, plus fifty minutes of time and the agreement that the patient, lying down or seated, will say anything at all. The analyst’s attention is evenly suspended in this room. The analyst tunes their unconscious to the unconscious of the patient. They are aware of all sense-impressions, feelings, biases, reveries, and the meaning and or non-meaning in the speech of the analysand. The point is to remain open, to accept all these and yet to make no decision upon them. The point is non-judgment; which, for Freud, means in a literal sense, non-thinking. Interpretation, while inevitable, is a forgone conclusion, merely another feature of the room. The psychotherapist Mark Epstein has argued that this particular kind of attention is the same as the old buddhist technique of bare attention.
Several Circles, 1926, Kandinsky
