Clinical listening

between psychologization and phenomenolpgical-existencial analysis

Abstract

Foucault has questioned the production of the phenomenon of psychologization through clinical psychological hearing, an unfolding of confessional dialogue. If the criticism is directed at psychoanalysis and its practices, the Rogerian referential cannot be ignored, as it defines what clinical hearing and dialogue must be like. If there are risks and traps of a confessional psychologizing or deaf hearing, we aim to show that phenomenological hearing arises simply as a way to correspond to what appears and shows of itself, a mode that is suspended, present both in the patient who is distressed, as it can be increased by the psychotherapist in a position of negativity towards what comes to him or her. This is the position of phenomenology-hermeneutics and Heidegger’s existential analysis. Not every clinical hearing will be confessional or psychologizing. These practices are late in relation to what marks the existent in its most proper way: those to whom their own existence and other existent matter.