Routledge W.R. Bion Studies Series
I'm happy to announce that my new book Facets of Psychoanalytic Listening will soon be available from Routledge. Look for it in December 2026 from Amazon or directly from Routledge.
NOW AVAILALBE TO PRE-ORDER at AMAZON. Please consider pre-ordering as this makes a difference in sales and promotion.
NOW AVAILALBE TO PRE-ORDER at AMAZON. Please consider pre-ordering as this makes a difference in sales and promotion.
What it is about: |
This collection explores psychoanalytic listening as an embodied, affective, and imaginative practice. Beginning with sound as a formative dimension of experience, it considers how hearing becomes listening when filtered through memory, dream, sensation, and emotional truth. Drawing on Bion, Ogden, Winnicott, Galeano, and others, the essays examine the movement between being and meaning, feeling and thinking, ontology and epistemology. Central to the work is the analyst’s evolving sensibility: an internal workspace capable of receiving primitive anxieties, recognizing patterns, and reflecting experience back with greater clarity. The chapters present clinical, theoretical, and personal reflections on listening as immersion, intuition, faith, and openness. Rather than offering a systematic theory, the book invites readers into an ongoing inquiry into how psychoanalysis creates a space where experience can be heard, transformed, and brought to life.
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What people are saying about it: |
This is a very beautiful and profound book. Its clinical reach is long and wide, to the far side of extreme psychopathology… A gift and an uplift from an extraordinary teacher.
Anne Alvarez, Author, A Thinking Heart This book probes the experience of listening on many levels, from many different angles… Eaton is a close reader of Bion and his appreciation of Bion’s work flashes through every chapter. One feels the expression of his personal experience of analytic listening coming through and opening new pathways for contact and creativity. Michael Eigen, PhD, Author, The Challenge of Being Human. Facets of Listening is a major contribution to contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice. Eaton writes with a language that is at once precise and evocative, anchoring the ineffable in the immediacy of the clinical encounter. A clear thinker with a gift for coherent articulation, he is devoted to psychoanalytic listening... and always attuned to clinical life. Avner Bergstein, Author, Bion and Meltzer's Expeditions into Unmapped Mental Life. Facets of Listening is a book on the cutting edge of psychoanalytic thinking worldwide. The book is beautifully written, profound in its message, and a unique contribution to psychoanalytic practice and pedagogy. Eaton’s voice is authentic and compelling. He has an exceptional ability to describe primal analytic experiences in ordinary language. He avoids psychoanalytic jargon and instead describes experience in evocative ways with a style and illustrative technique that uses metaphors and compelling stories to make complex ideas understandable. Eaton gives his reader an experience of ‘feel thinking’, a concept from Bion that he demonstrates. In doing so, he enables us to notice that which we may not have noticed before. I highly recommend this book. Judy K Eekhoff PhD, Author, Bion and Primitive Mental States Jeff Eaton is one of the most creative and open exponents of the art of depth psychoanalytic listening. The essays gathered here represent a significant continuation and expansion of the thinking that he presented in his first book, A Fruitful Harvest: Essays after Bion. That is, they are genuinely ‘essais` - attempts not at completion but at further creative development. These ‘attempts’ evolve in two directions: one is that they involve the elaboration, not of ‘meaning’ or thinking but of what Bion called ‘feel-thinking’ as the basis for psychoanalytic action and attention. Centrally, this means assuming the responsibility of not simply listening to the other/patient but also equally as Bion put it “listening to yourself listening”. The second direction is expansion of his learning and understanding beyond the strict boundaries of psychoanalysis into the broad fields of Buddhism, meditation and ‘the suchness of experience’. His aim, richly described and realized, is to become, as a writer, “a feel-thinker”, one who “finds the words to express what experience is”. For psychoanalysis to survive and develop, this is a vital work, richly articulated. I cannot recommend it too highly. Dr Roger Bacon, Author, Psychoanalysis in the Dark. Eaton's current volume, following A Fruitful Harvest: Essays after Bion (2011), continues a unique dreamscape in psychoanalytic listening and being with another. Deeply engaged in both the transformative and aesthetic grammar of welcoming and obstructing elements in human life, Eaton writes succinctly; Psychotherapy can provide a sincere invitation to explore whatever a person thinks, feels, wishes, fears, desires, imagines, remembers, regrets, doubts, suffers, or intends. A psychotherapist working in a psychoanalytic tradition helps a patient register, tolerate, explore, and describe experience so that consciousness is gradually enlarged by revealing unconscious patterns and their potential significance. (Eaton, 2026, p.) Psycho-analysis, in Eaton's view, serves as a welcoming container for an improbable conversation, scaffolding the unfolding of our inherent problems in living. Relying on a unique psychoanalytic sensibility, both offered and expanded upon in the current volume, through no less than 10 chapters, enlarges the American Independent Psychoanalytic Tradition, exemplified by eminent psychoanalysts such as Michael Eigen (1993, 1996), Thomas Ogden (1992, 2005, 2016), Christopher Bollas (1992,1999), and Lawrence Hedges (1994)(among others). Throughout the current work, Eaton explores the liminal space that arises when ontological and epistemological psycho-analysis meet. An aesthetically informed (binocular) vision becomes increasingly evident, enlarging current psychoanalytic sensibilities, and with it, our receptiveness to 'attend',' feel,' 'perceive,' and 'think,' 'with’-‘in' both primary and secondary process, whether 'pleasant' or 'unpleasant.' Eaton's current volume, as lucid object (ala Chrisopher Bollas), articulates openly and directly the possibility and transformative potential of a binocular aesthetic sensibility, a sensibility facilitating an internal psychoanalytic workspace as well as a psychoanalytic field experience between therapist and patient, protecting that which is "personal, richly detailed, and textured, as well as open for the patient to discover how to use the therapist and the therapy process" (Eaton, 2026, p.). From the Foreword "Dreaming, Thinking, and Feeling with Jeff Eaton" by Loray Daws, PhD |