Freud held fast to the basic rule from its enunciation in 1912 through the development of the structural theory in 1923. Argelander cannot agree, therefore, with writers like Sandler, who sees analytic work not as understanding the patient's unconscious but as making the right interventions from the structural point of view. Nor can he agree with others who have argued that adherence to the basic rule results in a caricature of analysis. But he feels there is a basic lack of clarity about the basic rule. The injunction to free associate applies really only to word association; patients also give us their associations by telling connected stories and narratives. It is often claimed that the analyst interprets the associations according to his theory. This does not mean that he imposes the theory upon the associations, but rather that the theory functions in the background of the analyst's thinking. Unless this is clarified, one of the major modes of analytic work is left unaddressed, and the relation between theory and data becomes blurred. There is a fundamental difference