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.
When is a free association not a free association? You will notice that I have couched this question in the same format as an old riddle or joke but, unlike that structure, it has no quick and clever answer. Instead I will try to open up the question and make it relevant to the themes emerging in this conference - free association and the workings of the unconscious mind. Although I have spoken of a free association, this is a short-hand term. I doubt that it makes sense to think of a free association as a unit in isolation from its immediate context. If the field created between patient and analyst is not free-associative in its basic processes, then the elements being produced may resemble free associations in appearance only.
The main argument in this paper is that the connection between ‘as-if’ relating and pseudo-free association is the importance to the patient of what Bion called the uninterrupted validation of their daydreamed self. I hope I may be able to make this clearer as I go on.
Long before I was invited to talk at this conference, the question forming the subtitle of my talk today came to me as I listened to a patient, Mr R, a 35-year-old man who had been in analysis with me for four years, a man who just could not free associate. He would, however, talk as though he could. He told me regularly and earnestly that what he was about to say had just come into his mind. He would say, with a cheery, lilting tone, ‘I can't imagine why I am thinking of this but …’; ‘Heaven knows why this has just popped into my mind …’, and I would notice that I had begun to feel somewhat enlivened and even a little hopeful of meaningful communication; now I would be able to do some work - only to discover a little later that both of us had been speaking empty words with great confidence.