Free Association: A Contemporary Introduction

Free-associative discourse opens the patient’s discourse to what is otherwise than that which can be translated into a text.

Psychic reality is necessarily defined in terms of the particular person’s psychological processes; it comprises ‘all that is real for the subject.’ It is an interiority of persona experiences and understandings, a ‘Innenwelt’ as Freud sometimes called it.

Consciousness is always falsified and falsifying … Not in the sense that some other configuration of consciousness might be ‘true’ but in the sense that consciousness by its productivity always occludes to itself that it excludes ― forecloses or ‘builds over’ ― something else that is ‘in but not of’ its own constitution as consciousness.

If we listen to free-associative discourse, we discover the repressed unconscious, and moreover the repressive (and suppressive) functioning of consciousness is only elucidated by listening to the sequential flow of its own free-associations, which Freud also called the train of ‘chaining of thought.’

The [deceptive] self-certainty of the reflective ‘I’ of self-consciousness is ‘attacked’ by the discourse of free-association. The subject can only come to understand its own constitution and momentum by allowing itself to fall into ― Freud’s notion of freier Einfall ― the flow that indicates the inherency of its own perceptual deferral or displacement from itself.

These considerations [about the essential role of the psychoanalyst] enable us to appreciate how self-analysis is ultimately impossible, and why the [absenting-] presence of an interlocutor ― indeed, the special presence of the psychoanalyst’s participation in this asymmetrical or lopsided ‘dialogical monologue’ ― is fundamentally necessary to the initiation and maintenance of a genuinely psychoanalytic process.

Free-associative discourse epitomizes the promise of the postmodern era; methodically deconstructive yet strangely curative, it promises and an emancipatory mobilization of the transmutative subject-as-process and of its truthfulness-as-process. Such discourse moves ‘through and against’ all identitarianism ― the Hellenic harmony of unification, the Hebraic separation and difference bound by rationality and obligation to ‘law, and the Christic-Islamic fulfillment or reconciliation in the hopeful image of ultimate salvation.

What free-associative discourse exhibits goes beyond the procedures by which representations may be combined and permutated in all sorts of metaphorically and metonymically novel formations. Rather, as I have indicated, such discourse opens the speaking subject to the fluxes, flows, fluidities, vibrations, and undulations of desire and this exhibits an alternative dimension of the subject’s being-in-the-world in a way that is perpetually enigmatic and extraordinary.

The fear of free-associative discourse is due to the way in which it relinquishes ‘making-sense’ and facilitates a special sort of listening to the enigmatic messaging of our embodied experience. This messaging presents itself as the incessant motion and commotion of erotic energies within us, and perhaps also around us ― that is a semiotic field we sense only as being chaotically ‘guided’ by inchoate and enigmatic pathways of pleasure (Lust) and unpleasure (Unlust).

Psychoanalytic treatment, as the arc of free-associative discourse, is undoubtedly an existential journey, honouring awareness, presence, and freedom by re-aligning the subject with the erotic ethicality of our embodiment.

The psychoanalyst and patient are in a flesh-and-blood encounter, a libidinally alive and highly charged relationship that is comprehensible to neither of them. Yet it is solely the psychoanalyst who has to take ethical responsibility for the way in which the strange occurrences experienced by the patient are to be addressed. This responsibility is implemented by the psychoanalyst’s facilitation of the patient’s free-associative journey.

Psychoanalysis seeks the momentum of its process in logical and rhetorical cacorhythms, misprisions, and discrepancies, in the pursuit of an ‘excess’ [of meaningfulness] that is alienated or estranged within, of an ‘essence’ that is nonessentially essential.

One very remarkable feature of Freud’s assertion that free-association is required for psychoanalysis to occur is that he continued to insist upon this fundamental point even after 1914, when the focus of his labours was on the construction of theoretical edifices ― conceptual systematizations ― by which psychotherapeutic procedures [as contrasted with psychoanalytic processes] may be governed.

An understanding of the world is conditioned by the inner order and disorder of the one who understands.

…the very momentum of free-associative discourse ensures an articulation of the desire of embodied experience, which ― although never completed ― ensures the liveliness of the subject’s life, through the embrace of its castratedness and deathfulness.

[The commitment of free-associative speaking and listening] is the key to psychoanalytic healing, to its truthfulness and to the significance of asserting that freeing the subject from suffering is the unique aim of psychoanalysis and that such freeing involves a shifting of the subject of self-consciousness from the stases of alienation into the mobilization of estrangement.

Consciousness can never master its ‘dynamic unconscious’ but steadfastly believes that it might master ‘all that is the case.’

A major misunderstanding is the assumption that the sole purpose of free-associative speaking is as a ‘data-gathering’ means toward an interpretive end.

Free-associative discourse enables us ― compels us ― to reconsider the fundaments of time, consciousness, and sexuality, including our assumptions about the nature of repetition, about the locus of our pleasure, and about the ‘sexual body’ in relation to stasis.

The emphasis of radical psychoanalysis is that its praxis is not about arriving at substantive interpretations about psychic life. Rather it is about re-animating psychic life free-associatively, freeing its truthfulness from repetition-compulsivity by listening anew to the energies of desire.

Psychoanalytic negativity as a discourse that reflects upon and interrogates the ideology of false-consciousness, requires us to reorient radically our thinking and conduct with respect to the fundamental questions of reality, subject, and science.

Free-associative speaking must be understood as involving a special mode of receptivity that I call ‘free-associative’ listening.

To have genuine insight into Freud’s revolutionary discovery, which is the significance of free-associative method, one must enter psychoanalytic discourse. The essence of such access is to surrender to become a patient whose commitment is to think and speak aloud whatever ‘comes to mind,’ whose fate is invariably and necessarily to resist this mandate…

The very ‘absenting-presence’ of the psychoanalyst unsettles the hegemony of the narratological-imperative … and secures the passage of free-associative speaking…

Only free-associative discourse can transport the subject along the pathway of this liberatory directionality [that dislodges the repetition compulsivity of the ‘I’], but surrendering to the freedom that this discourse offers places our egotism at risk. It is a matter of personal risk, of daring.