The Discipline of Listening
On dialogue, democracy, and what collapses when listening disappears
Last Friday I attended a workshop organised by the Group Analytic Network London at the Institute of Group Analysis, where I trained for almost a decade. The room was filled with group psychotherapists and practitioners interested in how group dynamics shape personal and collective life. We had gathered to think together about a question that feels increasingly urgent: what happens to the world when its capacity for dialogue begins to erode?
Workshops like this offer a rare moment: to meet colleagues in person and sit together in reflective practice, outside the paradigm of doing, be that client work, training, activism, writing, or the many tasks of ordinary life. Instead we choose to sit with complex themes, leaning right into the depths of the human experience. Not as something ‘out there’, but as something within us. It is the kind of shadow work that defines this community of practice.
We are all involved in projective processes, because they are unconscious, and because it’s how we begin. Babies quite literally push their unmanageable emotions into their caregivers, in order that the mature adult can metabolise (and detoxify) the overwhelming feelings that rush through the infant nervous system. Basic experiences like frustration, hunger, cold, or excitement. Melanie Klein described this process as projective identification: the way unbearable emotional states are unconsciously placed into another person so that they can be contained and understood.
It’s normal for parents to miss things and make mistakes, but the tragedy unfolds when caregivers continually fail to manage these primary elements. Instead of turning the volume down, the emotion gets acted out upon the BodyMind of the developing child. Transgenerational trauma hides in these early gestures, accumulating until some form of collective monstrosity plays out once more.
The title of the workshop was Why Are We Becoming Afraid of Dialogue? Carrying at its core the ever-present threat within dialogue: the risk that communication will break down and split into a kind of war, powered by fight or flight responses. Fear, in other words, of what the other might do with what we say, or what we might have to feel, if we really listen. It’s the place where aggression and attack (both emotional and physical) easily follow. The place where victims and perpetrators are positioned. The place where violence and death take hold.
So although we were in discussion about the practice of sitting in groups as a healing modality, what we were really touching were the most challenging large group psychodynamics of our age. Perhaps of being human in general, but particularly right now, in a time of senseless killing, fascism, and racism, of societies riven with trauma and the unfinished legacies of empire. And when you’re willing to take a look at that, there are multiple unearned privileges, systemic inequalities, and unbearable losses that surface, for all of us.
That is what we were sitting close to.
In these gatherings someone offers an opening seminar to get our thinking in motion. On this occasion it was given by Sue Einhorn, a deeply respected group analyst and incisive voice within the group analytic network. Her work spans decades of clinical practice alongside earlier years in community organising and youth work, and she brings a commitment to the exchange of dialogue and to the understanding that human beings only truly come to know themselves in relationship. Her opening was quietly radical: a reminder that the capacity to disagree without destroying the other is not a given. It has to be practised, held, and sometimes fought for. As she noted, Group Analysis “emerged at a time in history (WWII) when hatred of the other squashed reflection and dialogue. Our work was to rescue the phoenix of dialogue and help it rise to embrace the value of other people’s minds.”
Underlying that purpose is a core concept that orients everything. Foulkes, the founder of group analysis, named the Group Matrix as the web of communication and relationship that forms whenever people gather.1 It is the shared ground from which all dialogue arises. We tend to imagine that our thoughts and perceptions belong purely to us as individuals, but group analysis proposes interdependence: that our minds develop within this field from the very beginning.
In the reflective discussion after the seminar (there were about fifty of us in the room, sat in a large circle of chairs) one of the first things I noticed was a strong focus on the frustrations of the speaker in dialogue. The challenge of finding your voice, the feeling of being censored, the fear around what you cannot say. And the very real threat, for some more than others, of retaliation and violence.
When I had the chance to contribute, I spoke about the way the centre of gravity in the group seemed to rest upon the speaker who longs to be heard, bypassing the work of listening. Because surely dialogue cannot exist without the capacity to listen.
And if we stay with the idea of the listening participant, another question appears. Are we really listening when we think we are listening? Or are we simply filtering what is being said through what is already inside us? That filtering is predicated upon the past, clouding our ability to meet what is actually present.
Each of us carries an internal map of the world, shaped by memory, culture, personal history, and countless emotional experiences. Most of the time we do not realise that this map is organising our perception. In group analytic language this inherited field is called the Foundation Matrix: the accumulated cultural, familial, and historical forces that shape how we perceive the world before we even begin to speak.
Beneath even this inherited layer lies something older still: the Primordial Matrix. This is the earliest and largely unconscious field of bodily and emotional experience from which all life begins. Long before we have language, we are already immersed in rhythms of feeling, sensation, and interdependence. This is also the realm of our deep inheritance, the ancestral traces carried in the body before individual stories begin.
“Nothing ever dies.”
—Toni Morrison2
Dreams often carry fragments of this invisible realm. In my own practice I pay very close attention to dreams (my own and those of my clients) because they offer the unconscious, and our ancient human lineage, a way to speak within the shared field of a group.
Foulkes believed that this shaping of a human being runs deeper than culture alone. He suggested that what we call mind itself is never purely individual, “all that is mental is a matter of more than one individual person from the beginning.”3 What we experience as our “own” perception is already shaped by this relational field. The mind is not simply a private space inside the head; it is continually formed through interaction with others.
So when someone speaks, we often imagine that we are hearing them, but in truth we are experiencing them through the accumulated knowledge of our past. Through what we already believe, what we already fear, what we have already decided is right or wrong. In the ontology of Maturation practice, we call this the survival mind. And once that map has taken hold, something subtle happens, we’re no longer meeting the person in front of us, we’re meeting our idea of them.
Foulkes suggested that the true nature of mind lies in our need for communication and reception, for speaking and being received by another. Real listening requires that we learn to distinguish the nature of our perception as it happens, noticing how quickly the mind moves to interpret, defend, or conclude. Only when that movement becomes visible can another kind of seeing and hearing open. One that isn’t coming from what we already know, but essentially, coming from a space beyond that ‘knowing’ paradigm, which we might call: nowhere. And only when we can come from this nowhere place, can we really hear and discern what is needed, in the here and now. In group analytic theory this kind of live encounter is located in the Dynamic Matrix: the relational space that emerges through interaction itself.
Dialogue does not collapse because people disagree.
It collapses when listening disappears.
“Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin4
Psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion spoke about the importance of the therapist learning to listen “without memory or desire.”5 He was pointing towards a receptive, expansive, openness. A state of being where we resist the urge to conclude or to know before whatever has arrived has fully arrived. John Keats described this quality as Negative Capability: the capacity to remain “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”6
It’s not a technique, it’s a context. And that leads to another question. When we are listening without memory or desire, who is actually there? There is certainly no solid ‘me’ there. Instead, there is a space.
“Open, unobstructed, and allowing everything to appear within it.”
—John Wellwood7
A psychotherapy client recently began his session with me by questioning the point of therapy. He knows something is happening, but quantifying it feels impossible.
I asked him: who do you come to sit with when you come to therapy? Do you come to sit with me? Or do you come to sit with yourself?
There was a pause. The question had landed. Because the answer, when it came, wasn't really about me at all. His enquiry seemed to connect directly to how he devalues his own needs, voice and experience, and that pointlessness became a mirror. Because what is uncomfortable about therapy has very little to do with me. What becomes uncomfortable is what you begin to encounter when you sit there.
If I am doing my job properly, I am not really there. The space that I am is there. And yes, within that space there are many pieces: my knowledge, identity, experience, intuition, empathy, and my many limitations—but these are not the central position. Where I am coming from is nowhere. And that is precisely what gives any of us the capacity to listen.
Which means that if I am truly listening, someone may have an authentic experience of themselves, without interference. There is a kind of quiet divinity in that encounter: life meeting itself, and realising that nothing is wrong. There may be heartbreak and desperation and terror and love and longing, but the deeper intelligence knows that none of that means anything about who you are. It is the weather of being human. And in that weather, which can sometimes be so incredibly painful, we need each other more than ever.
If dialogue depends upon listening, so does democracy. Democracy is not simply the freedom to speak; its very framework requires a willingness to release personal certainty long enough for something new to appear between us.
“The object of dialogue is not to analyse things, to win an argument, or to exchange opinions. Rather, it is to suspend opinions and look at them.”
—David Bohm8
As Sue Einhorn reminds us, “By listening to ordinary people in our therapy groups, we value all thoughts and do not regard the conductor’s ideas as more important than those of group members.” Even the arrival of compassion where there was none before can begin in this way. When we sit together in dialogue we are not simply exchanging thoughts; we are participating in the ongoing creation of the psychological world we inhabit together. Dialogue is the moment in which the matrix becomes visible.
Let me say it like this: the mind is not a thing inside the head, but a series of events unfolding between people. And reality is not ‘out there’, it is being generated moment by moment through us. When individuals come together in dialogue something else appears, and just as systems theorists have observed, a group becomes something beyond the mere sum of its component parts. This is where collective action draws its unique power.
For a few years now I have been holding a group space called Earth Matrix. The name came to me in a dream as I grappled with how to integrate my deep psychotherapy roots with the wisdom of non-dual practice and the somatic intelligence of Chi Kung. People often assume that what happens there is therapy, or ontological enquiry or embodiment. And those things are present. But at its heart the process is simpler than that.
Learning to sit in the presence of others.
Learning to speak.
Learning to listen.
And learning to listen in decolonised ways.
In my work this includes listening to the seasonal wisdom of nature through the ancient Chinese philosophy of the Five Elements, and listening reverently to dreams, drawing on the Tavistock tradition of the Social Dreaming Matrix. In this setting dreams are approached as expressions of the shared unconscious life of the group, and of the wider world. Dreams carry messages from parts of the matrix that have not yet found words. As Charlotte Beradt wrote in her study of dreams under the Third Reich, “dreams are the diary of a society.”9 When they are spoken in a group, something of that deeper field is given a much-needed voice. It is another form of shadow work.
My facilitation in Earth Matrix is to hold a space where people can listen together, without rushing to control or resolve what arises. Something begins to shift and reorganise on its own when listening deepens in this way. Often the most important thing that happens in this kind of groupwork is not what someone says, but what becomes possible when someone is truly heard.
“Deep listening is the kind of listening that can help relieve the suffering of another person.”
—Thich Nhat Hanh10
Spaces where the matrix can be felt and worked with directly are rare, places where something larger than any individual can begin to appear. Yet they may be one of the few places where dialogue can begin again.
It’s essential to remember that dialogue is not only a practice within therapy rooms or groups devoted to reflection. It is something we must develop the capacity to bring into the societies we share together.
In the very last minutes of the large group at the end of the workshop, something happened that surfaced this in the most direct way. We had been circling ideas all afternoon: what can or cannot be said, the ways speaking can quickly degrade into concrete, binary, and aggressive states where people wound each other.
Once again, the privilege of speaking revealed itself as an assumption. There are times when your mere existence generates attack.
A woman with brown skin spoke. She shared that she had been in an active internal dialogue throughout the afternoon, listening closely, but had not felt the need to say anything until that moment. She had been turning over in her mind her recent experience of being hit in a public space without warning, because of her race.
She spoke about it with grace, though it was clearly painful. She said she had not been able to enter into dialogue after it unfolded. There could be no dialogue with her attacker. But she was interested in speaking about it here, perhaps as a way of expanding her process of repair.
And then there was silence. A long silence. A kind of wordlessness about how to be with such an experience.
She had not been unsafe because the dialogue failed. The dialogue had failed because she had already been made unsafe, before she could speak, and before she set out on her day. That is what listening cannot reach, when the conditions for being heard have already been destroyed.
One of my colleagues finally offered a response, associating to the protest placards declaring opposition to genocide and support for Palestine Action. Those home-made cardboard signs mean a great deal. For those without a voice, for those who remain unheard, for all who are disappeared, they are everything.
They signal that someone, somewhere, is willing to make a stand.
And that someone is listening.
Sometimes dialogue begins with the courage to say the words that others are no longer safe to speak.
Reflections and responses are always welcome in the comments. Emma Reicher is a UKCP-registered Psychotherapist, Group Analyst, Maturation guide, and Elemental Chi Kung teacher whose work explores non-dual wisdom, the intelligence of dreams and the relational field of human experience.
Foulkes, S. H. (1973). Group Analytic Psychotherapy: Method and Principles. London: Gordon & Breach.
Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Foulkes, S. H. (2003 edition). Introduction to Group-Analytic Psychotherapy. London: Karnac.
Le Guin, U. K. (1969). The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace Books.
Bion, W. R. (1970). Attention and Interpretation. London: Tavistock.
Keats, J. (1817). Letter to George and Tom Keats, December 21.
Wellwood, J. (2000). Toward a Psychology of Awakening: Buddhism, Psychotherapy, and the Path of Personal and Spiritual Transformation. Boston: Shambhala.
Bohm, D. (1996). On Dialogue. London: Routledge.
Beradt, C. (1966). The Third Reich of Dreams.
Nhat Hanh, T. (2001). Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames. New York: Riverhead Books.