Floating Attention is a concept that comes from psychoanalysis. It refers to the special state of consciousness that the therapist needs in order to be able to listen to the patient and detect what is most significant in his story. Something like letting go of things that are not important or relevant in what he says and attending only to those that serve to capture the essence of the problem.

Said like this, it sounds easy, but the fluctuating attention requires a long training and a very peculiar level of alertness. And sometimes you need to focus your concentration on something other than the other person's speech to capture what is truly substantial.

Floating Attention for Sigmund Freud

Freud argues that the only norm for psychoanalysis is the fundamental rule of Free Association as the determinant of the output of the analyzer. This marks the guideline for working in the orientation of psychoanalytic clinics, free association is therefore the appropriate format to move in.

On the other hand, the analyst must find his own position in the transference bond, in the face of free association marked by the sequence of the patient's speeches. This concept is used by Freud regarding the singularity of listening, what makes his act as an analyst floating attention.

Floating attention

Floating attention implies, on the part of the professional, the momentary disappearance of his conscious preconceptions and unconscious defenses.

There must be a suspension, as complete as possible, of everything. What often gets attention: prejudices, even the best-founded theoretical assumptions.

For Freud, this precept would allow the analyst to discover the unconscious connections in the patient's speech, which keeps in his memory a large number of apparently insignificant elements, whose correlations will become apparent later.

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Floating attention raises serious theoretical and practical problems. On the one hand, it would be the only "objective" attitude, because it is adapted to an essentially deformed object.

But how does the analyst really remove the influence of his conscious biases and unconscious defenses on his attention? For this, Freud advises didactic analysis. But Freud demands more than all that, the goal would be to achieve true communication from the conscious to the unconscious.

Floating Attention Rule

In reality, the rule of floating attention should be understood as an ideal rule that, in practice, it faces difficult demands and, sometimes, insoluble difficulties. For example, how would interpretation and construction take place without the analyst giving privileged importance to a certain material, comparing it, schematizing it, etc.?

In fact, the foundations of psychoanalytic dialogue happen from me to me. Some later authors, following Reik, tend to identify floating attention with a form of empathy. This would occur essentially on an infraverbal level.

For Lacanians, the key lies in the similarity that exists between the mechanisms of the unconscious and those of language, in psychoanalytic listening. It is a matter of making this structural similarity between unconscious phenomena work as freely as possible.

Floating Attention

Of what underpins the psychoanalytic method, the analyst's neutrality, the rule of abstinence and floating attention are always highlighted. Regarding the latter, Sigmund Freud makes explicit:

"We should not attach particular importance to anything we hear, and it is fitting that we pay the same fluctuating attention to everything."

By this he means that we should not prioritize anything in particular in the analyte's speech, regardless of inflections, highs and lows, the listening will be monotonous. Outside the consultation we leave our prejudices, our fixation on classifications.

Moreover, with a certain itch, we abandon our defenses and fall asleep, waiting for the tide to take its toll. If on one side the patient associates freely, on the other the analyst listens more than freely.

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Our listening in floating attention

Our listening is then hypnotized. And it seems that it is no longer the analyst who with his hypnotic charm goes deep into the patient's mind, but the patient's voice and its influence that makes the analyst's ear levitate. And he attentively tilts his head to listen.

But it is the voice that asks to be heard. And the analyst, more than a mirror, is an empty ear where the other precipitates his anguishes and the howl of his ghost? In any case, Michel de Montaigne used to say that the word is half who pronounces it and half who listens to it. The history of the neuroses is a dialogical construction, a narrative in two voices, sustained by listening.

The art of listening

Plutarch, a Greek philosopher, was among the classics who wrote most about listening. In Peri tou akouein, which was published as "The Art of Listening", he refers to the ear as the only sense, passive and active at the same time. It allows access to the logos and, therefore, to the teacher's word and to self-knowledge.

He even gives indications of a practice very close to this floating attention, in which he proposes that the ear allows itself to be penetrated by the logos without the will mediating it. However, the listening described by Plutarch is in the service of virtue itself and of learning oratory. And this is more than attention to the other.

Dictionary meaning of floating attention

In psychoanalysis and other forms of psychodynamic psychotherapy, the attention state of the analyst or therapist is also suspended during the therapeutic session.

This attention does not focus on anything the client says, but allows the analyst or therapist to hear all the material presented and to tune into the client's unconscious affections and ideas. Also called uniformly hovering attention .

Final considerations

According to Sigmund Freud, floating attention was created to designate the technical rule according to which the analyst must listen to the patient without privileging any element of his speech and, furthermore, allow his own unconscious activity to function. Floating attention is the counterpart of the free association proposed to the patient.

Freud formulates this technique explicitly that we should not attach particular importance to anything we hear, and that we should pay the same fluctuating attention to everything.

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