The Open Mind and Some of its Anxieties

In this paper I want to describe some of the obstacles for a particular patient in the way of her being able to achieve a freedom of thought (Segal 1977) and an accompanying freedom of speech - that is to say the expression of those thoughts out loud to me. By ‘freedom of thought’ I mean something that goes deep as well as wide. It includes the emotional depth that has its origins in the unconscious, as well as the dimension of time - that is to say, the meaning and significance of historical events. In my patient there was a marked ‘horizontal’ split between the breadth of her cognitive capacities and the depths of her unconscious phantasy. And, although the facts of her own history were known to her, their significance seemed to be missing. I am going to try to show how, during the course of her analysis, she moved from a position in which her freedom of thought was limited and restricted to one in which a greater degree of mental movement was possible, in terms of these three dimensions of space, depth and time. I shall speculate on the factors that had restricted her movement in the first place, and on those subsequent experiences that seemed to be helpful in freeing it up. And I shall conclude by suggesting that ‘free association’ in a modern analysis can be taken usefully to include the way a patient links up with - associates with - his or her objects, internally and externally, by showing how my patient became more able to perceive and tolerate her objects' links with each other.

Freud's original notion of ‘free association’ really derives from a different epoch in the history of psychoanalysis, a time when he hoped it might create in waking life the conditions of dream. Freud felt it to be the path (if not quite as broad as the ‘royal road’) which could, if the analyst were a sufficiently sensitive, open-minded and keen-eared tracker, be established between that which was unconscious and irrational, and that which was conscious and rational. Provided the pat