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Thirty-two years ago, when the last panel on free association addressed this core psychoanalytic concept, the title of today's panel would have been inconceivable. Framing the question that generated this panel, Axel Hoffer, panel moderator and chair, noted the changes in psychoanalytic thought and practice that led him to wonder whether analysts today questioned the centrality of free association. Because of contemporary emphases on a two-person psychology, the irreducible subjectivity of the analyst, and the here and now, was the primacy of free association being displaced? Replaced? Expanded?
Hoffer set the historical primacy of free association as a unique tool of investigation, both deceptively simple and infinitely complex, in fin de siècle Vienna, where academic psychologists and psychiatrists were exploring the promises of associations as a tool for unlocking secrets of how the mind worked. Freud, Jung, and Ferenczi debated not only the role of free association in overcoming resistances, but also the way in which associations themselves could function as resistances. In a milieu in which doctors gave patients answers, Freud listened to patients to discover the answers. Unprecedented candor and honesty lay at the heart of this method.
Hoffer, turning to the German word Freud himself preferred, freier Einfall (what freely falls into your mind), noted that the person associating, minimizing self-criticism as much as possible, waits for the thoughts to “fall in.” In the analytic situation, the evenly hovering attention of the analyst is as important as the analysand's free associations. Does this inherently imply a two-person psychology? Or is it more like parallel play?