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Now that the reader has an overall view of psychoanalytic therapy from the historical development and the theoretical framework, the present section will outline a general introduction to technique as it is currently practiced. It will consist of working definitions or descriptions of the therapeutic procedures and processes which are utilized in classical psychoanalysis. The purpose is to provide a glossary of technical terms and concepts and to demonstrate how some of them are used in the partial and diluted analytic therapies as compared to psychoanalytic therapy (E. Bibring, 1954; Greenacre, 1954; Gill, 1954; and the Additional Reading List).
In classical psychoanalysis the predominant means of communicating clinical material is for the patient to attempt free association. Usually this is begun after the preliminary interviews have been concluded. In the preliminary interviews the analyst had arrived at an assessment of the patient's capacity to work in the psychoanalytic situation. Part of that evaluation consisted of determining whether the patient had the resilience in his ego functions to oscillate between the more regressive ego functions as they are needed in free association and the more advanced ego functions required for understanding the analytic interventions, answering direct questions, and resuming everyday life at the end of the hour.
The patient usually associates freely most of the hour but he may also report dreams and other events of his daily life or past history. It is characteristic for psychoanalysis that the patient is asked to include his associations as he recounts his dreams or other experiences. Free association has priority over all other means of producing material in the analytic situation.