The Third Ear

In 2016, I went into psychoanalysis to understand, from a Lacanian perspective, how we listen to ourselves and to the Other. Lacanians propose an alternative mode of listening, directed at the deeper layer of the unconscious. This mode of listening invites the person in therapy to come to know their own unconscious in its singularity. In listening, we become. We share the experience of being listening. The analyst as listener is not a master.

In the last session, I proposed to my psychoanalyst that we stay quiet for a while: silent in the room, together, listening. I recorded this moment and the moment before it, in the waiting room. To listen is to wait, to be suspended for as long as possible in the virtuality of the analytic relation. The third ear can hear voices from within the self that are otherwise inaudible, drowned out by the noise of our conscious thought processes. Two raw recordings, neither modified nor mastered: just moments of waiting and listening in a Lacanian psychoanalysis session, pressed onto red mini-CDs.

Context

“Ex nihilo nihil fit” – Parmenides of Elea

The essence of psychoanalytic understanding is the third ear: the unconscious capacity to decipher the psychological clues that inspire psychoanalytic conjectures. The clue is linked to unpleasant psychodynamic material that has been repressed and thereby placed in what Reik calls “a zone of silence” in the dynamic unconscious. Reik claims that the third ear decodes clues through an indirect process of understanding, made necessary by the fact that we cannot know ourselves or others directly.

What the sensitive therapist hears is the musical rhythm of the patient’s discourse. When the therapist lets go of preconceived, systematic ideas, the “emotional undertones” of the patient’s associations “become clearly audible and distinct as if amplified by a microphone”, and the patient’s singular personality emerges. It is telling that Theodor Reik borrowed the term “the third ear” from a passage in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil that discusses the ability to appreciate the musicality of language.

Silent, dynamically unconscious material is “concealed” by the patient’s speech but “revealed” by her silences: “The (patient) speaks or is silent, and accompanies his speech or silence with ‘speaking’ gestures. We see the play of his features, the variety of his movements.” In essence, Reik claims that the unconscious has a built-in system designed to intuit the other’s unconscious by decoding interpersonal signals. It is this system that Reik calls the third ear. The therapist’s subjectivity is therefore not so much an impediment to listening as the “root” of psychoanalytic listening itself. Psychoanalytic listening is unconscious. The ability to listen with the third ear “is not teachable”; otherwise, listening with the third ear would be of purely scientific interest, with no practical relevance.

Exhibitions

Exhibited as part of Archive of the confusion at the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid.