You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I would like to comment, perhaps a little more discursively than the other papers you will hear today, on some of the problems posed by free association for many contemporary analytic patients.
Free associations are never free, or at least when they are relatively free this is a sign of successful therapy or a mature character. The freedom to associate does not imply an absence of determination, but the elimination of the voluntary selection of thoughts and a reduction in censorship between consciousness and the preconscious. In this way unconscious defences are revealed.
For psychotherapists and analysts to discuss together free association is very important, in my view. Free association is a subject that precedes theory, and can therefore provide us all with common conceptual ground. Free association is not divorced from theory, but it is a method and a process derived from clinical observation, rather than theory. Only with the selection procedure - that is, the choosing of which elements of free association to emphasize or otherwise - do the theoretical differences between clinicians become apparent. What unites our pluralistic, divided discipline is a commitment to the free association method and its meaning.
Freud employed the metaphor of a train to describe free association, inviting patients to reflect on their own thoughts as if they were in a train observing them as they went on their way. What is revealed by this process is a train of thought, sometimes clear, more often than not obscure, usually requiring time to elicit and occasionally destined to remain elusive. By placing the patient in the unusual position of observer of his or her own thoughts, with the aim of facilitating associations between what is present and what is absent, Freud created an unusual form of personal anthropology. We become the ethnographer and indigenous object of study at the same time. There is an unconscious other to whom we relate.
For reasons of time I'm not able to go into wha