ON PSYCHOANALYTIC LISTENING - LANGUAGE AND UNCONSCIOUS COMMUNICATION

The authors review past and recent perspectives on psychoanalytic list ening, then present a synthetic model founded on psycholinguistics and semiotics. They argue that the analytic listening process can be brok en down into nonlinguistic communications and-most important-linguisti c categories pertaining to narrativity, symbolic reference, form, and interactive conventions. In each of these areas of signification, the authors present the ways in which the technique of psychoanalytic list ening attends to unconscious meanings, thereby differing from ordinary listening which ''hears,'' at best, only denotative and connotative m eanings.