The struggle to listen: continuing reflections, lingering paradoxes, and some thoughts on recovery of memory

This paper offers a further expansion of the author's continuing endeavor to highlight and explore subtle distinctions and lingering paradoxes in how we listen, and to reconsider their profound implications for clinical work and discovery. Several perhaps commonplace clinical moments are used to sharpen illumination on psychic experience that might otherwise remain outside conscious awareness, whether in the domain of the repressed or in other mnemonic realms, such as "implicit" or "procedural" memory. It is suggested that added dimensions of these different levels of memory may, through our struggle to listen, be ultimately knowable.