Listening in the analytical clinic

Abstract

This article deals with the use of a life story in the author's research on the individuality process. In analysis and research, the life story is the method that favors listening. Anthropology and deep psychology can enrich it. Rousseau conceived of ethnology in the XVIII century with the other as the main motive of the theory. The "pitié" allows for identification with the suffering of fellow man. Merleau-Ponty considered anthropology through its way of thinking when the object is the "other" and demands our transformation. We have created interfaces between anthropology and analytical psychology, because otherness is the Jungian matter. Jung evaluates the conscious exercise of withdrawing from any projection of the external world as a necessary condition for a true encounter. Second interface: analytical listening. It seeks to reach the unconscious fantasies and to facilitate the rising up of unconscious layers. For Merleau-Ponty, the perception is selective, perspectivist, like deep psychology listening. Third interface: the experience of the intersubjectivity. The interactive field between the storyteller and the listener of a life story bears a third element, the product of the encounter between the two subjectivities: the subtle body. In this harmony, we speak according to this constituted field of sensitivity. The clinic is also present in study with students, or in human sciences research, based on narratives. It has a role in the world and can produce a refined methodology. The words of my interviewee belong to the domain of the "third included". Jung deeply expounded on this symbolic copulation