The Difficult Freedom From a Plan

The author attempts to describe a tendency among analysts in connection with presenting clinical material to become either too dogmatic or too insecure, either idealising knowledge or uncertainty. Both extremes may also mean idealising intellectualisation. Instead, the author suggests that these tendencies arise as a reaction towards complex psychological strategies from the patient, and that these strategies need to become clarified, instead of the analyst intervening prematurely with the mentioned extreme tendencies. In order to do so, the analyst needs to be free from inner automatic programmes. Two clinical vignettes are described where the analyst's own repression plays a part in his interventions. Freud's technical papers are analysed concerning frame factors and technical recommendations and the author shows how Freud's classical technique is modern in its emphasis on freedom and preliminary truth in interpretations. Freud's papers also seem to agree with Bion's motto ‘without memory or desire’, which the author discusses as the freedom from a programme. He recommends three governing mottoes for the area of interventions, in order not to idealise the image of psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts. He concludes with a third clinical vignette that underlines the connection between classical analysis and modern analysts who emphasise the freedom from idealised programmes within the psychoanalytic frame.