Free-association as praxis
Publish Date : September, 2024
As was discussed in the previous (#001, August 2024) issue of Critique and Praxis, psychoanalysis ― as an authentic journey of truthfulness and liberation ― must be rediscovered by each generation and by each individual psychoanalyst-in‑formation. One aspect of the reasons for this is that psychoanalytic processes are not to be understood as a technique associated with a theory of the mind (in the classic sense coming from ancient Greek philosophy, not method as epistêmê-technê). Rather, very much following the thesis of the Rediscovering Psychoanalysis trilogy, psychoanalysis ― as the discipline of free‑associative speaking and listening ― is to be understood in terms of method-as-praxis (or poiesis and praxis).
This implies that psychoanalysis is not to be appreciated as an ordinary practice that is governed by a pre‑existing theoretical structure. It is indeed scientific, but it is not an ordinary science (in the conventional analytico-referential or logical-empiricist senses of the term). Indeed, it has been a longstanding mistake to define psychoanalysis as if it were a merely psychotherapeutic practice that might be engaged in the manner of what Freud called “official science” (such as a science like engineering or pharmacology). That is, to define it as a theory, or set of theories, about the mind (structural‑functional or ego psychological, object‑relational, self-psychological or relational‑interpersonal), which can then be applied psychotherapeutically in terms of techniques that are used instrumentally or manipulatively to maneuver the patient toward a greater degree of adaptation and adaptability. However, psychoanalysis is not equivalent to ― a normalizing, theory‑driven and ideologically steeped practice of ― psychotherapy that prioritizes adjustive procedures of interpretation and understanding.
Rather, psychoanalytic discipline is praxis ― an ontoethical method of speaking and listening, that prioritizes the changing of what is over the arrival of a formulation or interpretation of what was (and what maybe will be, by procedures of prediction and control). The notion of discourse that is ontoethical (as contrasted with an epistemological practice that is conducted under moral stringencies) will be discussed in a later issue of Critique and Praxis. Whatever understandings emerge in the course of its personal journey of change are treated as provisional, helpful ideas ― what Sigmund Freud called his Hilfvorstellungen ― that may be discarded or transcended as the dynamic interrogation proceeds. The dynamics of free‑associative “workplay” transform and transmute our being‑becoming, which refuses to be treated as an “object” that can be pinned down by conceptual formulation or interpretation. All this was discussed extensively in Beyond Psychotherapy: On Becoming a (Radical) Psychoanalyst
Despite its ancient Greek roots, praxis is best explicated by Hegelian philosophers such as August Cieszkowski (1838) and Karl Marx (1844, 1845/1888). It is unlikely that Freud gave much, in any, consideration to the implications of this particular lineage of philosophical writings. Praxis is notably a processive method that changes the character of things, their history, even as it understands them. This entails an entirely different relation between them. That is, the conventional relation ― between a subject who knows about a domain of objects that are to be modelled interpretively, known about, and then perhaps instrumentally or manipulatively transformed by means of the subject’s knowledge ― is abolished. This abolition was neatly (perhaps too neatly) summarized in Karl Marx’s 1845/1888 aphorism that we should deprioritize further interpretation of the world, in order to prioritize the activities of changing it. Freud would surely have had some familiarity with such a doctrine, but there is little or no direct evidence that he was impacted by it. Such a notion, proposing that one only truthfully knows a thing by changing it, is surely germane to an appreciation of the power of free‑associative discourse.
Arguably, in the twenty years during which the method of psychoanalysis was born, Freud deployed relatively few Hilfvorstellungen. He had the notion that ideas (representations of thoughts and feelings) could be variously invested, disinvested or divested, with psychic energy, which would result in their variable intensity in relation to reflective consciousness. He also had the notion that ideas could lose their energetic investment such that they became repressed or ‘lost in translation’ ― yet remaining clandestinely but actively impactful on the domain of self‑consciousness. But not much else mattered for the initiation of psychoanalytic praxis, except perhaps his finding that the most forbidden ideas, those that violated the incest taboo, operated as if they had crossed a “barrier” (this then being considered the prototype of repression). Effectively that is all Freud had for him to become convinced of the unique properties of free‑associative praxis and of their necessity for psychoanalysis. It was in this period from 1895 to around 1915 that Freud arrived at, and consolidated, his commitment to, the method or praxis of free‑associative speaking and listening. That is, method-as-praxis, contrasted with method-as-technique.
Opposed to technique, the notion of praxis implies an exploratory or revelatory method both that is not governed by an explicit or implicit framework of preconceptions and that changes the ‘object’ as the optimal way to become aware of its functioning. Thus, changing the object’s being‑becoming is the prime mode of praxis, and knowing about the object is derivative. ‘Helpful Ideas’ ― auxiliary to the change process ― may arise along the way, but these are treated as provisional notions, to be deployed, interrogated and ultimately discarded. Thus, any formulation of ‘what’s what’ is at most a temporary by‑product of the change process, and is not the endpoint of the intervention. Freud called these auxiliary ideas his Hilfvorstellungen (badly translated in James Strachey’s Standard Edition as ‘conceptual scaffolding’). Their provisional status highlights the dynamic character and conditions of praxis, in which ‘understanding’ ― in any sense of the term ― is at most a consequence of change, not the cause of it and not the prime goal of the venture. We will shortly return to the notion of free‑association as praxis, because it is crucial to any appreciation of the way in which psychoanalysis is authentically psycho‑analytic.