Chapter IV. Unwitting Interpretation

In one of his early papers on technique, Freud (1913) gives his most complete statement of what has come to be called the “Basic Rule” of psychoanalysis:

One thing more before you start. What you tell me must differ in one respect from an ordinary conversation. Ordinarily you rightly try to keep a connecting thread running through your remarks and you exclude any intrusive ideas that may occur to you and any side-issues, so as not to wander too far from the point. But in this case you must proceed differently. You will notice that as you relate things various thoughts will occur to you which you would like to put aside on the ground of certain criticisms and objections. You will be tempted to say to yourself that this or that is irrelevant here, or is quite unimportant, or nonsensical, so that there is no need to say it. You must never give in to these criticisms, but must say it in spite of them—indeed, you must say it precisely because you feel an aversion to doing so. Later on you will find out and learn to understand the reason for this injunction,

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which is really the only one you have to follow. So say whatever goes through your mind. Act as though, for instance, you were a traveler sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views which you see outside. Finally, never forget that you have promised to be absolutely honest, and never leave anything out because, for some reason or other, it is unpleasant to tell it. (Freud, 1913, pp. 134-35)

Noteworthy in this wording is the visual metaphor. In assuming that the patient is merely “looking” at a changing “landscape” of thoughts, Freud underemphasized the problem—raised in Chapter III—of putting pictures into words. The task of presenting the traveling companion with a complete picture of the passing scene is far more complex—as we have seen—than Freud's metaphor would imply. Similar problems—as we have seen in Chapter II—are r