The Therapist As Listener: Martin Heidegger and the Missing Dimension of Counselling and Psychotherapy Training by Wilberg Peter

Author:Wilberg, Peter [Wilberg, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 2015-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

Inner Hearing and Inner Seeing

‘Thinking is a listening which brings something to view…something one can hear. In doing so it brings into view what was unheard (of).’

Martin Heidegger

The practice of maieutic listening prepares the ground for a special type of intuitive perception or in-sight. Its basis is the listener’s ability to turn their gaze inwards, withdrawing energy from their bodily eyes and peering into the darkness within their souls, as if they had their eyes closed. By not focusing visually on the client’s body or face, the therapist can listen more effectively with their own body, hearkening to the silence beneath their words and sensing in a quite physical way the relationship between an individual’s speaking body and personality and the silent inner core of their being. The in-sight that the listener then develops is not like the physical perception of an object but is a feeling perception of this fundamental relationship. If, at the same time, the therapist is also able to let images arise of the objective situations, events and relationships that the client describes, it becomes possible for them to enter and dwell within these images as within a dream. The maieutic listener ‘sleeps’ into the speech of the other, not only in order to share the person’s experience of the event or relationship, but in order to feel it from the perspective of their sleeping inner being. The type of perception that then develops can be compared to the unborn child’s experience, from within the womb, of events experienced by the mother during pregnancy. The extent to which an individual is able to stay in tune and in touch with their inner being in their everyday life and relationships is comparable to the mother’s ability to stay in touch with her baby during pregnancy. Just as the baby in the womb is invisible and inaudible to physical perception so is the client’s inner being. The midwife must come close to the mother’s belly to hearken to the baby within, or use ultrasound scans to see it. But the maieutic listener can develop an inner picture of an individual’s relationship to this being by (a) listening closely to the way the person speaks about themselves whilst at the same time hearkening to the being that speaks through their words, and (b) by attending closely to the verbal picture they give of different events and relationships, whilst at the same time feeling their way into these pictures. This feeling in-sight will in turn generate intellectual insights. These do not take the form of borrowed psychoanalytic metaphors such as those used to ‘interpret’ dreams, but of metaphorical images - images which, like those of our dreams themselves, require no interpretation, for they are precise interpretations of directly felt comprehensions.

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