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the here-and-now therapeutic relationship. This way of approaching the psychotherapeutic situation encourages us as professional listeners to experience ourselves as living human participants involved in a full emotional relationship with someone endeavoring to experience, and to express in one way or another, his or her relational life experiences. The Listening Perspectives approach further encourages us to formulate our work in terms of theories that enhance listening and speaking possibilities within a living, breathing, here-and-now relationship, rather than theories that seek to reify or personify concepts or to capture the eternal verities of existence or the true nature of the human mind as objectively defined and viewed in isolation.

This approach finds fault with all reified and personified processes—including multiple selves, dissociation, and enactments. The four self-and-other relational Listening Perspectives to be briefly considered here have evolved out of more than 100 years of psychoanalytic research that bridges across existing theories of the mind.