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This brief volume is an unusual, timely and valuable contribution to our literature. It is, in one sense, an essay in celebration of Freud's momentous discovery of free association. By sharing with us how one analyst works and how he thinks about his work, he brings us with him into the working place where we observe with him the raw data of technical formulations and interventions on the one hand, and the source of theory building on the other. Both ventures, he asserts, are in danger of being compromised whenever we stray too far from the matrix of analytic work—the free associations of our patients and the steps we take to enhance them.
He makes his intention very clear in the first chapter when he describes 'the analyst's goal in the use of the free association method as the enhancement of the patient's free association and not as the production of insight, nor as the development of a regressive transference neurosis, nor as the reduction of symptoms or suffering. Naturally the free association method itself is undertaken with the therapeutic aim of reducing a broad range of symptoms and suffering, but within the method, so to speak, the analyst's goal is to further the process that results from using the method' (p. 3).
In the course of subsequent chapters in which free association is both the subject of inquiry and the mode of inquiring, we are given an opportunity to appreciate anew the breathtaking expansion of understanding made possible by the bold new step that Freud took when he abandoned hypnosis.
Kris calls our attention early on to the varieties of free association. He is content to use the term in a number of different ways, and his attention to the ways in which they may be classified is an important contribution. For example, he notes that some associations, 'a sequence of thoughts, feelings, wishes, sensations and images, present or remembered—relatively unencumbered by consciously directed, purposeful organization' (p. 8), may be influenced by