The temporalization of existence and clinical listening

Abstract

Listening and silence are essential aspects of discourse. From a daseinsanalytic perspective, listening is the very open being of being-there. But there are also constitutive devoid modes of listening such as not wanting to listen, to listen indifferently, to resist, to defend oneself, to oppose. Just as the medium everyday discourse has its characteristic mode as impersonal idle talk, its own listening also undergoes the restrictive inflections of the impersonal everydayness mode of opening. If, psychotherapeutic listening can be understood as a care that anticipates hidden possibilities, allowing the being-there to make them manifest in the discourse and to relate to them in a more proper way, this listening must, first of all, awaken and cultivate the affective dispositions whose mode of temporalization suspends and silences the impersonal idle talk of everyday activities.