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What characterizes understanding in psychoanalytic processes is that it develops in a joint process and then appears directly to both participants. This understanding process in statu nascendi and in vivo distinguishes psychoanalysis from all other therapeutic procedures.
How can a treatment situation come about in which the unconscious manifests in the transference relationship in presentia? Or to put the question another way, what are the necessary preconditions for this kind of situation of direct understanding of psychic structure and dynamics?
To answer this question, we must examine more closely both the key psychoanalytic methods discovered by Freud that are valid to this day: free-floating attention and free association.
Free-floating attention is the necessary counterpart to the demand made on the patient that he should communicate everything that occurs to him (1912, p. 112). Freud goes on to write, with dry masterliness: “He should withhold all conscious influences from his capacity to attend, and give himself over completely to his “unconscious memory.” Or, to put it purely in terms of technique: “He should simply listen, and not bother about whether he is keeping anything in mind.”” Therefore: no strained attention, no intentional noticing, but an artificial fading out (Freud in a letter to Andreas Salome, 1916, 1980, p. 327). We must keep everything similarly suspended in free-floating attention while also allowing our intuition to work.
The patient’s freely associated communications are searched in a free-floating way, to identify his unconscious.
Freud writes:
Just as the patient must relate everything that his self-observation can detect, and keep back all the logical and affective objections that seek to induce him to make a selection from among them, so the doctor must put himself in a position to make use of everything he is told for the purposes of interpretation and of recognising the concealed unconscious