The concept of technique in psychoanalysis is to a certain extent ambiguous, pertaining on the one hand to theory (presenting itself as a theoretical model and method), and on the other to clinical practice, from which therapeutic results and theoretical knowledge are derived. A good example of this ambiguity is contained in the free ‘term associations’, which may simultaneously be considered as an expression of clinical technique and of method, and as a theoretical model.

The ambiguity increases all the more if we cease to consider the analyst and patient as distinct and separate entities, but as functions of a single, autonomous analytic process, in which the unconscious representations and the affects of both patient and analyst obey uniform laws of the unconscious and employ identical cathexis and