"Wandering Attention" in psychoanalytical listening. Beyond the manifest content of a dream

French psychoanalysis

Abstract

On the example of clinical cases, the author offers a description of the phenomenon of wandering attention of the analyst in the process of psychoanalytical listening, when it is combined with the mysterious and incomprehensible aspects of the transference. What the analyst hears is not what he thinks he will hear. However, the patient does not say what he thinks to say. The analyst "without memory and desire", following Bion's recommendations, makes it possible to develop a dialogue in which the patient's formless and disordered material is endowed with meaning. As a result of these wanderings, unconscious motives suddenly appear and a certain direction is revealed.