Analytic listening is an ongoing conflictual process, containing all the components of conflict and shaped in every moment by both the patient's and the analyst's conflicts. The mutual responsiveness that develops between analyst and patient stems from a complex conflictual object relationship, fundamentally no different from any other object relationship, in which countertransference at all times simultaneously facilitates and interferes with the analytic work. Detailed clinical process is used to illustrate these and related phenomena, including the use of signal conflict, the benign negative countertransference, the function of countertransference structures, and the analyst's use of projection. The analyst's affects, thoughts, and actions trace the shifting nature of the patient's transference and resistance, and the level of the object relationship continuously being created between patient and analyst.

Analysts use the concepts of subjectivity and intersubjectivity to support many different technical recommendations; this represents a misuse of theory. The dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity is a false one. Arguing against the notion of objectivity, analysts conflate it with the idealized notion of pure objectivity and then eliminate various technical devices in its name. One cannot have a concept of subjectivity without a concept of objectivity, or an intersubjective perspective that does not include some agreed-upon concept of objectivity. The simplest definition of objectivity is a directional one. Objectivity is the perception or experience of the external; subjectivity is the perception or experience of the internal. Subjectivity and objectivity are both necessary pathways to knowledge and are dependent on each other. Any form of looking or listening does to some extent preclude another, but to speak solely from a subjective or an objective perspective represents a regression in thinking to a form of naive objectivism or naive subjectivism. Clinical examples illustrate how the forming and testing of hypotheses require the cooperation of both subjective and objective listening.

There are many different views of conflict in contemporary psychoanalysis, each with its own technical implications. After reviewing the psychoanalytic origins of the concept of conflict, the author discusses the diverse positions of four North American conflict theorists, each of whom offers a different view of the location of conflict both in the mind of the patient and in the material of the clinical hour. The role of conflict in the work of several relational psychoanalysts is then examined. A tentative approach toward integration is proposed.

Several detailed analytic hours illustrate how, with the analyst's full participation, patients use the words, setting, and activity of analysis to gratify the very wishes they are analyzing, and so disavow the work of analysis. These gratifications, which are hidden in plain sight, are themselves disavowed in the apparent pursuit of analytic understanding. In this way the patient's and the analyst's use of the analytic situation becomes the fundamental resistance to the work itself. This process shares features in common with perversion. The painful but necessary task for both analyst and patient is to analyze this process as it is occurring, moment by moment, in the real time of the hour.

Using detailed clinical examples, the author illustrates the function of conscious and unconscious identifications with former training analysts, supervisors, teachers, and theorists in the mind of the working analyst. As compromise formations, analytic identifications are the product of loving and aggressive wishes, defenses against those wishes, and self-punitive trends that accompany the analyst in the work. The analyst's stance at any given moment has an identificatory history that may become conscious at certain times with certain patients. While the analyst's identifications modify over time, following a predictable developmental path, they are never fully given up, but consciously and unconsciously remain an active part of the analyst's inner life. During the clinical hour they are responsive to both the analyst's and the patient's conflicts, and they coexist in a dynamic reciprocal relationship with the patient's inner life.