If you’re hearing others through the filter of your own concerns, you’re not really hearing them.

Psychoanalysts train for years to master the art of listening carefully. Most importantly, they labor at learning to decipher their “countertransference,” that is, at detecting experiences and desires that might filter and so distort the revelations of their clients. For example, an analyst who understands that she harbors red-hot anger toward her father would need to be careful of unconsciously and mistakenly hearing resonances of her dad in words coming from the person on the couch.

“How do you listen?” the Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti asked his audience in a 1953 talk. “Do you listen with your projections, through your projection, through your ambitions, desires, fears, anxieties, through hearing only what you want to hear, only what will be satisfactory, what will gratify, what will give comfort, what will for the moment alleviate your suffering? If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires.” Which is of course to say, you aren’t listening at all.

— Read on www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/opinion/art-of-listening.html