Listening to rubbish in therapy

This is the first of two linked articles. The second, ‘Listening but not-knowing in therapy,’ is here↗

Consider what happens when you overhear a conversation in a language you do not know. What reaches you is a more or less continuous ribbon of sound — rising, falling, running together. You know that it is language, but it arrives undifferentiated — you cannot hear where one word ends and another begins.

Now think about what happens when you listen to someone speaking English. The ribbon of sound does not present itself as a ribbon at all. You hear words, phrases, sentences. But this is not because English sound arrives pre-divided. The sounds themselves are just as continuous — what has changed is that you are parsing them, that is, transforming the undifferentiated sequence into a structured arrangement. This happens without awareness, so smoothly that we experience its result as simply ‘what was said.’

The same ribbon of sound can support more than one structured arrangement — as the Four Candles sketch considered below makes visible, and audible, with comic precision.

In ordinary conversation, we parse the ribbon into words — but we also listen selectively, tracking the point, following the thread. We register agreement or disagreement, notice information we need, and allow whatever seems irrelevant to fall away.

Without this, we could not follow directions, take part in a meeting, or have an argument. But it means that ordinary listening is selective in ways we rarely notice. It fastens on message and intention, and it lets go of whatever does not seem to serve them: the false start, the hesitation, the odd choice of word, the phrase that seems to come from nowhere, the repetition nobody asked for.

Four candles

The Two Ronnies’ ‘Four Candles’ sketch makes this audible — and visible. A customer in a hardware shop asks for ‘fork handles.’ The shopkeeper brings four candles. The comedy turns on the fact that both parsings of the same sound — faw-KAN-duhls / fawk-HAN-duhls — are perfectly legitimate, and neither man can hear how the other’s has been structured.

So far, two things have come into view. First, listening is not passive reception; it is an organised activity that segments, sorts, and selects. Second, this selection is invisible to the listener; we experience its results as simply “what was said.”

Evenly hovering attention 

Now imagine a different way of listening. Instead of tracking the speaker’s point and following the thread, you allow your attention to rest more evenly across everything that is said — including what does not seem to matter. You do not try to pin down the message or anticipate the conclusion. You do not fasten on what is clear and let the rest drop. Instead, you stay with the full texture of what someone says: the hesitation, the aside, the word that jars, the phrase that gets repeated though it appears to add nothing, the odd metaphor that arrives uninvited.

In therapy, we call this “evenly hovering attention,” and it is not what it might first sound like. It is not simply relaxing, or listening in a vague or dreamy way, or trying to be open‑minded. It is not about being nicer or more patient. It is a deliberate refusal to let one’s attention be captured too quickly by the obvious point, the stated intention, or the coherent narrative — precisely because ordinary listening is already very good at catching those. What it cannot catch is what it throws away: the verbal remainder, the apparent nonsense, the material that does not seem to belong.

This kind of attention is difficult because it works against a deeply ingrained habit. We are trained, from childhood, to listen for sense, and to filter out whatever is not contributing to it. Evenly hovering attention asks us to suspend that filter — not permanently, and not carelessly, but long enough to notice what ordinarily vanishes. It turns out that what people dismiss or skip over when they speak — the stumble, the digression, the throwaway remark — can be as revealing as what they carefully say. Not because it contains a hidden code, but because it has not been edited in the way that the official message has.

An extraordinarily tender gesture

A filmed account by a woman named Suzanne Hommel gives a more serious example of what another kind of listening can make audible. Hommel, who grew up in Germany during the Second World War, had been troubled for years by the same thing: she woke every morning at five o’clock, the hour at which the Gestapo had come to take Jewish families from their homes.

One day she mentioned this in a session. Her therapist – they spoke together in French – got up from his chair, came over to her, and gently stroked her cheek. In that gesture, she heard — or rather, felt — something she had not before. In French, the sound of the word Gestapo is similar to geste à peau — a gesture on the skin, a touch (geh-SHTAH-po, zhest-ah-po). The sound that for decades had given rise only to terror turned out also to support something impossibly tender.

Nothing was explained or decoded. What changed was that a second line became audible in a word she thought she knew completely. She had heard “Gestapo” thousands of times, always along a single track. It took the therapist’s evenly hovering attention — not cleverness — to prevent context from exhausting what that sound might mean. As she put it later: the touch did not take the pain away, but transformed it.

The throwaway

Unlike the attention given by Hommel’s therapist to the sound of her speech, ordinary listening is semantic — it segments the ribbon to settle on a meaning, treating anything else as noise — mere waste.

Yet in this extract from ‘Hidden Things,’ a short poem by the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, great value is ascribed to this waste. In one stanza he writes:

From all I did and all I said  
let no one try to find out who I was.
… 
From my most unnoticed actions,  
my most veiled writing—  
from these alone will I be understood.

His claim is simple and unsettling: life is not where public attention happens to focus but in this remainder, the trash. As we’ll see in part two of this article, this trash holds something of great value for the therapist also: it is there that the client alone will be heard.”

Notes

The account of Suzanne Hommel is drawn from Gérard Miller’s 2011 film Rendez-vous chez Lacan (An Appointment with Lacan). Unlike her therapist, I do not work with physical contact.

The Cavafy extract is from Hidden Things, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, in C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems, Princeton University Press (1975).

Originally written April 2026, revised July 2026.

This is the first of two linked articles. The second, Listening but not-knowing in therapy, is here↗