Listening Perspectives in Psychotherapy

Listening Perspectives is a classic in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. It deserves to be kept alive for a long, long time.
First, and most obviously, Listening Perspectives… is a tour de force of scholarship and integration. It is a unifying review of the most important contributions of psychoanalysis beginning with Freud and extending to our time. Hedges brings together these diverse and often complex ideas with two organizing themes which are intimately related. The first is developmental—a catalogue of the requirements, achievements, and possible arrests in development that help define personality and psychic structure. This developmental focus is presented in a relational frame such that the successes and failures of relational development are brought into bold relief. This developmental-relational perspective then leads directly to the understandings and interventions of the psychotherapy.
Hedges’ third organizing theme is his most innovative. That theme is given in the most unusual title: Listening Perspectives… When truly understood, this view of things produces a profound shift in consciousness. It leads to the use of knowledge, constructs, and theories to understand a reality far more complex than the knowledge, constructs or theories themselves. It halts the search for the “real” truth and opens the way to finding the most useful perspectives. It leads to flexibility in listening and responding.  It shifts the focus from the knowledge to the person of the client and the person of the therapist. The knowledge is not lost; it is reformatted as a perspective from which to understand and act. And, the perspective which proves most useful for understanding and action can shift at any time. This orientation to perspective allows us to integrate or juxtapose or incorporate perspectives as they serve the larger purposes of understanding and action. The recognition of the mind’s unfortunate tendency to reify constructs opens greater potential for not making that fatal error—to keep the maps maps and not confuse them with the territory. This orientation to knowledge and its function is related to a number of interacting trends in science and culture—among these are theories of chaos and complexity, constructionism, and post-modernity.