I was shocked to read the following statement by Henry Friedman:
“The tyranny of free associations and the insistence that the passive listening analyst and he/she alone gives the patient the space to express and explore his own thoughts and determine what is important in their mental life precludes the analyst's function as a life educator, as an individual who is free to use everything he knows in the service of a dialogical exchange with the patient”
How could a psychoanalyst make such a statement if he ever read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams where the method of free association is given its fullest description including Freud applying the method to analyze his own dream known as Irma's injection? And considering the countless positive publications on free association by generations of psychoanalysts, e.g., Erns Kris and his son Anton Kris (Free Association, 1996)?
A previous hostile reaction was issued by Irving Hoffman (The myths of free association and the potentials of the analytic relationship. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 87:43-61, 2006) where he claim that free association entails:
“1) the denial the patient's agency (i.e. the myth that the patient is not a free agent); 2) the denial the patient's and the analyst's interpersonal influence (i.e. the myth that the patient and the analyst are largely unaffected by each other's interpersonal attitudes and actions); and 3) the denial of the patient's share of responsibility for co-constructing the analytic relationship (i.e. the myth that the patient does not share responsibility with the analyst for the quality of the analytic relationship)” (p. 44).
I cited this statement by Hoffman and rebutted it in my paper “The analysand and analyst team practicing reciprocal free association: Defenders and deniers” (International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 19:155-164, 2010).
My first teacher of the method of mutual free association was Otto Isakower in the late 1960's when I was a candidate at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Isakower called it the analyzing instrument. In the early 1970's, until Isakower's death in 1972, two other former students of Isakower's, Leon Balter and the late James Spencer Jr., attended a private seminar with Isakower at his home and office at 1148 Fifth Avenue. This culminated in the first publication of Isakower's ideas (Balter, Lothane, & Spencer, 1980, “On the analyzing instrument,” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, XLIX (49):474-504), a psychoanalytic process based on the idea of mutuality.
In the aforementioned 2010 paper I used an operational term for Isakower's metaphorical term “analyzing instrument”: reciprocal free association. I first mentioned “reciprocal free association” in 1984 (chapter 10, “Teaching the Psychoanalytic Method Procedure and Process, in: Caligor, Bromberg, & Meltzer (eds.). Clinical Perspectives on the Supervision of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy The William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Society. New York: Plenum Press, pp. 169-192).
My recent publication on free association is:
Lothane, H. Z. (2018). Free association as the foundation of the psychoanalytic method and psychoanalysis as a historical science. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 38(6):416-434. (Editor-in-Chief Joseph Lichtenberg, M.D. Editor Melvin Bornstein, M.D. Issue Editor: Henry Zvi Lothane, M.D.)
I strongly protest the misleading characterizations of the method of free association by Henry Friedman and Irving Hoffman.