Associative Speech, Compulsive Speech

When a patient's speech is sufficiently associative such that he is able to say things without logically correlating the different subjects or the transition from one subject to another, and he has recourse to the “long circuit”, why interrupt and interpret? Why leave this position of witnessing a self-analysis that is happily running its course? The answer lies in the necessity of tension: an analytic process requires a degree of operant conflictuality, which cannot be the case if everything is going too well and the analyst simply keeps quiet.

A patient opened the session by speaking about stopping his analysis: “This morning, as I was coming here, I don't know why, but I felt like stopping the analysis.” Then, after a period of silence and various remarks about his daily life, he mentioned a mother he saw while crossing a square. She was accompanied by a child and clearly pregnant. This evocation then led him to recall the moment when his own mother had announced to him that she was expecting a baby: “The day she told me that I was going to have a little sister, I cried.” This is a classical situation. As in a dream, the consequence - the wish to stop the analysis - is stated before the cause, namely, having thought about his mother's announcement concerning the little sister while passing the child in the square. It is in this respect that speech is associative: its course follows the movement of a dream. It is also for this reason that interpretation can come in the form of an association. After a silence, the analyst said: “Stop the analysis? To avoid hearing me say that you are going to have a little sister?”

This classical interpretation was made possible by the tonality of the transference and the associativity of the discourse. It was heard and the patient responded to it by providing, by way of association, a dream.

Here, the interpretation establishes links between different tonalities of relations to the object that all infiltrate the patient's discourse,