Withholding focused attention can reveal what a speaker actually means

Evidence

Freudian psychoanalysis has formalized a surprising attentional practice, which is actually of considerable significance well beyond the psychotherapists’ couches and consulting-rooms. The PARADOX OF FREE-FLOATING ATTENTION suggests that by not paying attention to what someone is trying to tell us we will better understand the meaning of their message. There is paradox to the extent that we usually define speech as a communicational practice aiming at the intentional transmission of a message from a transmitter to a receiver. For this practice to be successful normally requires that two conditions are met: on the one hand, the said receiver must make himself attentive to the words of the transmitter, rather than the weather or the colour of his socks; on the other hand, he must seek to reconstitute what the speaker means by way of his words, rather than the origin of his accent. The paradox comes from the fact that while the psychoanalyst is certainly interested in what the patient wants to express, he thinks he is better able to discover this by not paying attention to what the latter ‘thinks he is saying’. The knowledge and practice coming from Freud postulate that unconscious desires haunt our words like spectres, and that it is by allowing our attention to float around the patient’s formulations that we can better grasp these apparitions. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 335

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: the attentive-listening demand of digital platforms vs. the psychoanalytic case for purposeful inattention — when is distraction the more careful mode?
• XREF: Directly parallels the free-floating attention idea with the reader’s earlier notes on silence and creative thought requiring cleared prior assumptions. — connects to: Distraction enables perception that focused attention forecloses — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 338; Linguistic thoughts can be heard as sounds rather than meanings — Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening, 221

Broader Connections

• Distraction enables perception that focused attention forecloses #qualifies (0.85) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 338
• Linguistic thoughts can be heard as sounds rather than meanings #exemplifies (0.80) — Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening, 221