Analytic Listening in Clinical Dialogue: Basic Assumptions

Analytic Listening in Clinical Dialogue focuses on the work of four leading clinicians as they assess how their unconscious basic assumptions impact their clinical work.

Using the case study of a seven-year-old boy, the authors evaluate a videotaped psychoanalytic first interview and exchange their mutual clinical approaches. Their discussions uncover the way that unconscious basic assumptions arise from the core of one’s personality and act as the pillars that support primary- and secondary-process thinking. These fundamental models of thought and emotion result in convictions which play a key role in the processes of understanding, evaluating, classifying, anticipating and regulating. The authors show how an ‘analytic listening’ approach can also be used to good effect in supervisions and intervisions, as it provides a path out of the domain of ‘being right’ into a space of what is shared as well as what is different. They argue that this method allows an analyst’s own blind spots to be reduced.

Translated from the original German, Analytic Listening in Clinical Dialogue will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and psychologists.

Dieter Bürgin is a psychoanalyst for children, adolescents and adults in private practice based in Basel, Switzerland. He is the former head of the Department for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Basel.

Angelika Staehle is a psychoanalyst for children, adolescents and adults in private practice in Darmstadt, Germany. She is the former chair of the IPA Psychoanalytic Education Committee.

Kerstin Westhoff is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and clinical psycho-oncologist at University Children's Hospital Basel, Switzerland.

Anna Wyler von Ballmoos is a psychoanalyst for children, adolescents and adults in private practice, based in Bern, Switzerland.