Drawing on Freud’s article, “Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning”, it is possible to refer the two modes of thought, associative thought and logico-deductive thought, to the twofold polarity of psychic functioning. Psychoanalysis seeks to restablish the relations between them without having need of the symptom. To do this it utilizes an ambiguous rule, that of free association. But free association can lead to the recathexis of traumatic traces at the origin of the deficiencies of primal repression. The analyst then finds himself challenged in person in the very first meeting. It is the form and intensity of this challenge that is decisive for positing the indication of an adjusted psychoanalytic treatment.