Free-floating attention suspends reasoning constraints to enable resonant re-association

Evidence

The psychoanalyst responds to the free-association of the patient, who is invited to say everything that passes through his head, with a free-association of his own, which has the same goal: producing disassociations and reassociations between the memories, images and words that haunt our minds, making us prisoners of pre-established schema of thought. Free-floating attention essentially consists in the suspension of the traditional constraints of reasoning so as to allow oneself to be carried by effects of resonance. Of course, this takes place in the highly asymmetrical framework of the cure, where one person speaks without really knowing what they are saying, while the other listens, asking himself what there is to be heard: it is because the patient attributes a supposedly superior power of elucidation to the silent attention of the psychoanalyst that the apparatus enables until now evanescent truths to coalesce. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 336

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes deep listening practice and the reader’s record of listening as active, structured skill. — connects to: Attention creates a shared space beyond both instrumental logic and endless suspension — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 75; Analogical reasoning can operate as an intuitive particular-to-particular leap without a conscious rule — Frederick Schauer, Thinking Like a Lawyer, 183; Human memory stores concepts as associative networks of linked nodes — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 972
• SHARE: Worth sending to someone doing therapy or listening practice: the paradox that disattention yields comprehension.

Broader Connections

• Attention creates a shared space beyond both instrumental logic and endless suspension #expands (0.75) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 75
• Analogical reasoning can operate as an intuitive particular-to-particular leap without a conscious rule #expands (0.72) — Frederick Schauer, Thinking Like a Lawyer, 183