Book Review: Genres of Listening

Genres of Listening: An Ethnography of Psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires, by Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas (2022). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Psychoanalysis has developed unevenly across the world. When I first studied psychology in the Netherlands, psychoanalysis was more often met with chuckles than serious engagement. Meanwhile, in Buenos Aires, psychoanalysis has given rise to what Mexican anthropologist Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas calls a culture of psychoanalytic listening. Whether you are talking with your therapist or a stranger, at home or in a taxi, porteños of all classes tend to listen beyond the immediate meaning of your words, attuned to messages from the unconscious.

In Genres of Listening, Marsilli-Vargas is interested in how Buenos Aires’s psychoanalytic listening culture is practiced in everyday situations. Having established this frame, she proposes a theoretical understanding of listening as a culturally dependent practice – or, as she puts it, a genre, a notion to which I will return later. The book, thus, offers both a cultural account of psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires and an empirical-theoretical exploration of listening as such. These objectives make the text substantively different from most literature on the “hegemony” of psychoanalysis in Argentina, which typically concerns why and how the discipline achieved its dominant status. Marsilli-Vargas, in contrast, is more interested in how psychoanalysis is enacted in day-to-day interactions.

Despite psychoanalysis often being referred to as the “talking cure,” the most common enactment of psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires appears to be psychoanalytic listening. Marsilli-Vargas describes this way of listening via which the listener tries to resonate with the latent meaning of the speaker’s words – which, in true Lacanian spirit, she summarizes with a formula: “when you say x, I hear y.” A typical example of such psychoanalytic listening would be that when an analysand is talking about their romantic partner, an analyst might infer something regarding said analysand’s relations with their parents. Yet the book shows that, in Buenos Aires, this way of listening is in no way reserved for analysts. Take the opening of Chapter 1 for example, where one of Marsilli-Vargas’s interlocutors recounts how a strange interaction with a taxi driver left him in doubt as to whether he had a favorite son:

“At one point he asked me if I had kids. I said, ‘Yes, Leo and Fede.’ He then asked me how old they were. I told him, ‘Leo is eleven and Fede is fifteen.’ At that point we were on a stoplight and the taxi driver—a man in his fifties—turned to the back seat where I was sitting and asked me, ‘Why did you mention the name of your youngest son first?’” (26)

Vivid accounts like these appear throughout Genres of Listening and make for a charming read. They are also helpful during Marsilli-Vargas’s frequent theoretical diversions – meaning that, at times, the book can be quite dense. In the remainder of Chapter 1, she strings together performance theory, linguistic anthropology, and the versions of psychoanalysis of Freud, Reik, and Lacan. Then, in Chapter 3, she describes how porteños’ everyday psychoanalytic listening practices function using psychoanalytic terminology, which is notoriously difficult. Yet, due to the many illustrations that Marsilli-Vargas offers in the text, these theoretical expositions rarely become self-referential and remain empirically legible.

At other moments, theory recedes into the background. Chapter 4 consists of a historical-institutional analysis of psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires, with a special focus on the centrality of listening within these institutions. In some sense, this chapter more closely resembles the typical literature on psychoanalysis in Argentina, as retracing the discipline’s history also implies questioning how its dominance was attained. In the following chapter, Genres of Listening turns creative once more, in its discussion of how psychoanalysis is represented in Argentine popular culture. Particularly memorable here is Marsilli-Vargas’s attention to graphic depictions of psychoanalysis, mostly in comic-book form. These are not only funny but also clearly illustrate that in reaching broader audiences beyond the clinical, psychoanalytic discourses take on different meanings. Well-known cartoonist Tute, for example, argues that psychoanalysis is more akin to an artistic than a scientific practice; he merely gives his own artistic twist to what he calls a “theory open to everyone” (152).

How indeed “everyone” might take on psychoanalysis is best described in Chapter 2, which is the section with the richest ethnographic material. Here, Marsilli-Vargas examines so-called Multi-Family Structured Psychoanalytic Therapy (MFSPT) – a sort of psychoanalytic group-therapy session. These sessions usually include multiple analysts and can count over 80 participants, who are all allowed to react to the comments of other group members. MFSPT, as a result, clearly breaks with the typical interpersonal analyst-analysand relation, which makes this approach worthy of scholarly attention in itself. But what truly allows these sessions to be so productive in the eyes of Marsilli-Vargas is that they showcase how MFSPT participants share an understanding of how to listen. It is in this very social context where she describes psychoanalytic listening as its own genre.

When used in the social sciences, the notion of genre is commonly attributed to the Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin, who coined the term speech genres to indicate how social settings structurally affect speech and how, simultaneously, speech anchors social interactions. As such, a military command and a business memorandum might be expressed in the same language, yet their differences in content, style, and structure constitute each into a separate genre. The notion of listening genres, then, proposes that not only enunciation but also particular forms of listening differ from each other in some socially reproduced manner, and that the nature of social interactions is in part dependent on how one listens. As Marsilli-Vargas emphasizes, many different listening genres exist; the anthropological listening genre, for example, turns the speaker into an informant, whereas the psychoanalytic listening genre invokes a second “voice” for one to listen: the unconscious.

Not everyone in Argentina is a fan of the psychoanalytic genre. The aforementioned Tute describes most everyday psychoanalytic interpretations as “nonsensical,” for example (152). Outside Argentina, psychoanalysis’s status is arguably even worse. The U.S. psychologist Martin Seligman, godfather of positive psychology, states that psychoanalysis’ emphasis on the self paralyzes patients. For him, it is long past time for psychologists in Argentina to move toward more action-oriented, behavioral-cognitive analytical frameworks (183). I wonder what listening genres are associated with these paradigms. In some sense, Seligman seems to be getting his way. Marsilli-Vargas mentions that slowly but surely, behavioral-cognitive approaches are gaining ground in Argentina. And yet, the psychoanalytic listening culture that Marsilli-Vargas describes no longer seems to be dependent on analytic experts and is therefore unlikely to disappear any time soon. In that sense, Seligman’s critiques seem like just another reflection of psychoanalysis’s uneven development than a more thorough interrogation of its methods.

Although nowhere explicitly noted as one of its aims, Genres of Listening is perhaps above all a defense of this uneven development. Rarely does Marsilli-Vargas translate her analyses into political positions; although these function as a departure point for a larger theory of listening genres, it is due to her meticulous descriptions of “everyday psychoanalysis” in Argentina that makes the book a worthwhile read. Its hidden – dare I say unconscious – message, therefore, seems to be that an idea of therapy that is much ridiculed by psychologists in some places is, in Argentina, systematically practiced by lay people. And this difference is not supposed to point to any sense of inferiority or superiority; it is simply different.