What is it to listen? How do we hear? How do we allow meanings to emerge between each other? 'This book is about what Freud called freely or evenly suspended attention a form of listening a kind of receptive incomprehension which is fundamental and mandatory for the practice of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. The author steps outside the usual parameters of psychoanalytic writing and explores how works of art and literature which elicit and require such listening began to appear in Europe in abundance from the late eighteenth-century onwards. Uncertainties Mysteries Doubts is a timely reminder in the present era of audit and manualisation of some of psychoanalysis's deep and living cultural roots. It hopes- by immersing the reader in the emotional critical and contextual worlds of some artists and poets of Romanticism- to help psychotherapists psychoanalysts and counsellors in the endless challenge of staying open to their clients and patients faced as we all are therapists and clients alike by multiple pressures to knowledgeable closure. . Language: English