“Facets of Psychoanalytic Listening:
Gathering the Data of a Session”
Jeffrey L. Eaton, LMHC, FIPA, BCPsa
How do psychoanalysts know what to listen for? What forms of experience become available when we attend not only to a patient's words, but also to enactments, bodily experience, and the unfolding analytic field?
Drawing on ideas developed in his forthcoming book Facets of Psychoanalytic Listening (Routledge, in press), Jeffrey Eaton explores listening as a disciplined yet creative analytic practice that deepens clinical understanding while resisting premature certainty. Through rich clinical material and in dialogue with Bion's work and that of contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers, he illustrates how multiple "facets" of listening can illuminate unconscious experience, foster symbolization, and support psychic transformation.
Participants will be invited to reconsider how analysts gather the data of a session and how different modes of listening shape therapeutic action. Whether you are an experienced clinician or an analyst-in-training, this presentation offers an opportunity to deepen your appreciation of psychoanalytic listening as a vital instrument for discovering meaning, facilitating transformation, and expanding analytic understanding.
Learning Objectives
After this presentation, participants will be able to:
1. Describe three dimensions of psychoanalytic listening—verbal text, enacted text, and embodied experience—and explain how each contributes to gathering clinical data.
2. Differentiate among interpersonal, intrapsychic, and intersubjective/transference levels of clinical meaning when reflecting on patient material.
3. Apply the concepts of revealing, representing, and recognizing to identify possible forms of therapeutic action in psychoanalytic listening and intervention.
About the Presenter
Jeffrey L. Eaton, LMHC, FIPA, BCPsa, is a board-certified psychoanalyst, a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), and a faculty member of the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. An internationally recognized teacher of Bionian and post-Bionian psychoanalysis, he has presented throughout the United States and internationally, including at the Tavistock Clinic, the Boston Psychoanalytic Society, the Australian Psychoanalytical Society, the University of Edinburgh, and numerous international Bion and Frances Tustin conferences. He is the author of A Fruitful Harvest: Essays after Bion. His forthcoming book, Facets of Psychoanalytic Listening, will be published by Routledge in the W.R. Bion Studies Series in Fall 2026.
About the Moderator
Caron Harrang, LICSW, FIPA, BCPsa, is a board-certified psychoanalyst with a full-time private practice in Seattle, Washington. She is an IPA training and supervising psychoanalyst on the faculty of the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and teaches throughout North America and internationally. Her publications include co-editor and chapter author of the Gradiva Award–winning Body as Psychoanalytic Object: Clinical Applications from Winnicott to Bion and Beyond (2021); “Introduction. Truth and Lies: Psychoanalytic Perspectives” (2023); “On Grotstein’s ‘Truth’ in Bion’s Theory of ‘O’” (2023); Nancy C. Winters, Caron Harrang, and Stefanie Sedlacek, “Transformations in O Online: Group Process in the Virtual Realm” (2024); “Earthquakes in the Analytic Field: A Post-Bionian View of Negative Therapeutic Reaction” (2025); and “Binocular Vision as a Function of the Analytic Field” (in press). For additional information, see www.caronharrang.com.
