Interactive Webinar
In order for the analyst to listen closely and be moved by the analysand, the analyst must be open, particularly to what is most foreign in the analysand’s discourse. In his previous visit to OPC, Anton Hart presented the concept of “radical openness”, a dispositional stance that involves the analyst’s “taking to heart” the things that the analysand experiences and formulates in relation to the analyst, both familiar and strange, as if there is likely to be truth within them no matter what. The radically open analyst aspires to take things that do not seem to personally apply and to live with them as potential truths that are beyond the analyst’s tolerable awareness.
Freud invented the idea of transference in order to enable the analyst to bear the strain of listening closely while feeling unrecognized. In this sense, the quite central concept of transference can be seen as having served as a self-protective edifice for analysts as they try to keep listening, even as they may regularly feel not listened to. But the downside of analysts’ adherence to the transference concept is that it may prevent them from being as open to the truths contained in analysands’ experience as analysts need to be in order to be moved, that is, to emotionally understand and to personally grow and evolve in response to the analysand’s discourse.
The implications–of radical openness and transference as self-protective edifice–for both general psychoanalytic technique and specifically for addressing issues of diversity and otherness in the clinical situation, will be discussed.
Anton H. Hart, PhD, FABP, is a Training and Supervising Analyst, former Fellow, and on the Faculty of the William Alanson White Institute where he teaches and supervises in several training programs including the Division I psychoanalytic program. He supervises at Teachers College, Columbia University and at the Derner Institute of Adelphi University. He teaches at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, at Mt. Sinai Hospital, at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy, at the St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute, at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies’ National Program, and at the Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia. He is a member of the Editorial Boards of the journals Psychoanalytic Psychology and Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He is a Co-Founder of the White Institute’s monthly Study Group on Race and Psychoanalysis. He serves as Chair of the Diversities Section of the Department of Education of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He is in full-time private practice of psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, supervisory consultation, and organizational consultation in New York City.
