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Hearing and Listening
By Stephen Proskauer MD | August 11, 2007
At a recent conference, four of us were sitting around chatting after attending a dream workshop. We were all senior practitioners interested in cultivating our capacities to listen deeply. I happened to notice that three of us were wearing hearing aids. When I mentioned this, the fourth person indicated that her hearing was beginning to fail as well. I started to wonder about the significance of this observation.
Was it just a coincidence or could the two phenomena, increasing focus on introspective listening and progressive hearing loss, be connected in some way? Is deafness more common among therapists than professions that do not require deep listening? Not having any data to go on, I can only speculate, but the implications are interesting enough to jot down.
Both phenomena are related to withdrawal from the physical experience of sensory input into the inner world of the mind and soul. We often regard deafness as a disability, but what if loss of auditory acuity frees us to explore the inner world with less distraction? Beethoven composed his most sublime and profoundly mystical music after he became stone deaf and could only hear his creations in his mind’s ear. He was spared the frustration of hearing imperfect performances by musicians who did not have sufficient skill or appreciation of his intent to do them justice. Beethoven’s deafness liberated him from the limitations of his era and allowed him to soar into a domain of ideal beauty, an unearthly perfection that continues two centuries later to startle us with its depth and daring.
Listening to the Ninth Symphony or the late string quartets, we are drawn into the realm of the universal and eternal. Perhaps these great works would have been composed even if Beethoven had not gone deaf, but I have my doubts. Loss of external sensation is bound to free us from the inevitable frustrations of the material world and allow us to drop into a realm of mythic proportions, the ideal world of dreams and archetypes and unlimited creative freedom. Similarly, hearing loss might deepen the capacity of a therapist to tune in to the deeper dimensions of the patient’s psyche.
Those who work with people as they are dying know of the panoramic vision that opens before them as they are progressively liberated from the constraints of the body. Perhaps waning eyesight, hearing, and physical vigor can be seen as gradual preparation for a larger dimension of being. Whether we realize it or not, as we get on into the later stages of our lives we have one foot in both worlds and our weight of attention is gently shifting from the confines of physical reality to the boundlessness of spirit.
As long as we remain embodied in physical form, however, we must relate to the conditions of the material world. Beethoven composed even his last works for existing resources – human voices and known musical instruments. Van Gogh, who was vulnerable to psychotic episodes but could still connect with reality and use his medium to paint in a supremely skillful way, remained productive until the tragic end of his life. It’s even possible that pathological distortions of reality from his tortured inner world may have contributed to the genius of his unique vision. And we might also wonder, what was significance of Van Gogh’s cutting off his ear with a razor during one of his psychotic episodes?
Of course, when loss of physical functioning becomes too extreme, an artist can no longer employ any medium of physical expression and can only dream. Once this state of withdrawal becomes permanent, artistic productivity ends and the artist’s fleeting creative visions are lost to humanity.
By the same token, we therapists have to understand and respond accurately and constructively to our patients’ life issues in order to be useful to them. If we are deaf to their words – physically, psychologically or spiritually – we are disconnected from their reality. In this state we run the risk of ignoring our patients, projecting our own fantasies on them or using their communications parasitically as a springboard into flights of narcissistic self absorption. Then it is time to restore our capacity to hear and to listen or else retire from practice.
On the one hand, becoming more inward may improve listening with the “third ear” and may also be associated with reduced awareness of the physical senses, whether through actual loss of these senses or through selective shifting of attention within. On the other hand, through deafness and blindness to manifest reality and withdrawal to the inner world, we can be cutting ourselves off from meaningful connectedness and preventing ourselves from responding accurately to our environment. The optimal state would seem to be a capacity to move flexibly between these realms, weaving them together and helping our patients to integrate them.
To be capable of such flexibility, therapists and artists must be able to make some contact with the world of the senses. Great artists and skillful therapists are never completely deaf, blind or unaware of others’ needs. Beethoven and van Gogh were creating for all humanity’s benefit. Likewise, we as therapists can never be deaf to the realities of our patients nor weave our dreams and intuitions for ourselves alone.
Fortunately, in the natural course of things our physical senses begin to wane at around the same time that we attain mastery of our craft rather than at the beginning of our schooling. For Beethoven, deafness did not overtake him until he had achieved full command of the art of composition. By then he had all the skill and experience he needed to take extraordinary liberties and make daring leaps of eccentric innovation that produced masterpieces rather than incomprehensible chaos.
Similarly, at this late stage we therapists are generally seasoned and experienced enough in our work that even a small amount of data from a patient tells us volumes. We become better able to appreciate the full significance of what we hear so perhaps we don’t need to hear as much as we did in our youth to understand the patterns being presented to us by our patients. We can now afford to go deep within ourselves without hearing every word. We can now identify what we are dealing with from just a few clues and are free to devote more of our attention to resonances from the inner world that reveal mysterious meanings and highly original ways of responding therapeutically. We can afford the loss of auditory acuity without diminishing the effectiveness of our work.
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