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REM dreaming (Fosshage, 1997). Both unconscious and conscious processing are always variably shaped by the relational fields within which they emerge. How does one gain access to unconscious processing? Freud developed the free association method and turned to dreams as “the royal road to the unconscious” (1900, p. 608). Ego psychologists have accented the unconscious components of conflict and defenses that emerge latently in conscious articulations. More recently Self psychologists have expanded the listening range so that, in addition to conflict, they listen for explicit and implicit, verbal and non-verbal communications of intentions, meanings and procedural knowledge. Empathic listening is ‘simply’ focused on hearing and understanding these communications from within the patient’s frame of reference. ‘Empathy and judgment’ interpenetrate (Goldberg, 1999); yet the attempt is to be in the analysand’s experience and to make inferences and assessments, as far as possible, from within the analysand’s experiential world. Use of the “ other-centered ” listening/experiencing perspective helps to tune into interaction patterns, typically unconscious ( Fosshage, 2011b). The use of empathic listening does not minimize the importance of unconscious processing . To the contrary, clinical experience indicates that a sense of safety is enhanced through the analyst’s intently listening from an empathic perspective, for it militates against the disruptive influence of an analyst’s imposition of his or her vantage point (though it does not, of course, eliminate this). The subsequent diminished need for protection increases the patient’s reflective space and facilitates the emergence into conscious awareness of unconscious conflicting and non-conflicting intentions, memories, meanings and processing, including unvalidated experience (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992), unformulated experience (D.B. Stern, 1997) and implicit patterns of organization (implicit knowledge). Implicit (relational) knowing consists of interactions with caregivers which is encoded in procedural memory and therefore cannot be verbalized (D.N. Stern et al., 1998). Unformulated experience consists of experiences in childhood which are not allowed in consciousness because they are not acknowledged by caregivers (D.B. Stern, 1997). The pre-reflective unconscious consists of organizing principles of subjective experiences that originate in the early intersubjective dyad, and unvalidated unconsicous cannot be articulated at all because of selfobject failure of validation (Stolorow and Atwood 1992). The similarity between the definitions of unformulated experience and the unvalidated unconscious lies primarily in emphasizing the response of caregivers. The two-person unconscious is constructed within the dyad itself (Lyons-Ruth, 1998, 1999). Thus, empathic understanding of the analyst tends to make more permeable and fluid the boundaries between conscious and unconscious, between explicit and implicit, and it increases conscious access to previously unconscious feelings, intentions, thoughts and interpersonal interactions.
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