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The author of this book is a psychoanalyst who has worked in the very favorable environment of Finnish psychoanalysis. Originally published in Finnish and later translated into English and Swedish, this compilation of Torsti-Hagman's papers focuses on exploration of the unconscious through the psychoanalytic instrument of free association.
The front cover of the Swedish edition , Vid symboliserin-gens kallor (At the Sources of Symbolization), depicts a Nordic landscape with a wild torrent that invites the reader to think of the sources of the river. The front cover of the English edition, Harvesting Free Association (2003), shows mature apples on a tree, ready to be picked; both pictures suggest a process and its origins. The English-edition cover appears to have been chosen to appeal to an international audience, with a consequent loss of some of its Nordic character. Also, several papers have been removed from the English edition, and others have been heavily edited; it appears that some of the wild torrent has been disciplined.
In the preface to the Swedish edition, Torsti-Hagman distances herself from ego psychology and object relational theories because, according to her, they overestimate the importance of the preconscious at the expense of the unconscious. She expresses this opinion in a more subtle fashion in the English edition.
Harvesting Free Association contains ten papers, several of which were previously published in the Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review or in international psychoanalytic journals, although some were newly written for the book. The reader is invited to harvest the fruit of Torsti-Hagman's incisive thinking, derived from her long and rich clinical experience. Throughout the book, she stresses her belief that the only method that allows us to reach the unconscious is one that makes use of dream interpretation and free association. Her theoretical thinking is classical, and it has