Rediscovering Psychoanalysis
listening – truthfulness – liberation
“Rediscovering Psychoanalysis” is dedicated to reviving the original spirit of the adventures inaugurated by Sigmund Freud. We focus on ― and are dedicated to contributing new ideas about ― the radical method of free-associative speaking and listening. Although obscured by subsequent theorizing, we seek to demonstrate how the praxis of free-association continues to be key to the discipline’s liberatory potential, which has been almost entirely lost in formulations generated after 1915.
Thus, we seek to advance an understanding of this experiential, experimental, and existential praxis as an ontoethical journey of being-becoming. That is, as a method which gradually frees participants from our common imprisonment in repetition compulsivity. “Rediscovering Psychoanalysis” shows how this is an adventure with sexual, somatic, and spiritual implications for our comprehension of what it means to be human.
The label ‘psychoanalysis’ has become almost meaningless. Nowadays it can refer to almost any conversation that is concerned with a person’s thoughts and feelings. But this is not how it was discovered in its initial two decades, when Freud realized the radical significance of the method of free-association.
In free-associative discourse, the analysand (or patient), who is comfortably reclining in the caring but notably silent presence of a qualified psychoanalyst, tries to speak aloud her/his stream of consciousness. Following this method is profoundly challenging and every patient resists the mandate to stay with it ― so it is the psychoanalyst’s role to compassionately address these resistances such that the patient feels safe in slowly relinquishing them.
What this praxis or method gradually achieves is the patient’s liberation from compulsive patterns of repetition that have consciously and unconsciously governed her/his life. Radically practiced, free-associative discourse is profoundly freeing. But it is also extremely challenging, and sometimes painful even when it is existentially and spiritually enriching.

Free-associative praxis is so unsettling for the patient (as well as for the listening psychoanalyst) that, in the past century, almost all so called ‘psychoanalysts’ have turned away from its rigors. Instead, they have revised the discipline, making it not so much an existential and spiritual praxis, but rather a series of objectivistic models of mental functioning. These models are then applied by psychotherapists to understand the patient and then to bring about modifications in her/his thoughts, wishes, feelings and behaviors ― with the goal of helping the patient to live more adaptively. These various models that claim their application in treatment to be ‘psychoanalysis’ include the structural functional model of the ego organization’s operations, the object relational model of the patient’s inner theatre of representations, self and relational psychologies, and so forth. All of them have lost sight of the significance of free-association as a praxis that defies subject/object epistemologies and as a revolutionary mode of personal liberation.
Because an authentically radical psychoanalytic praxis is so challenging ― breaking with the dominant modes of inquiry into an ‘object’ along with the object’s manipulation, and instead offering an otherwise way of being-becoming in the world ― it is perennially necessary to engage the labor of rediscovering psychoanalysis. This website is dedicated to that adventure and all psychoanalysts who share its vision and mission are invited to be affiliated with its Institute.
To read a recent essay on the project of Rediscovering Psychoanalysis click here.
For information about the Rediscovering Psychoanalysis trilogy click here.