IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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highlighting the rewards of health, enlisting the positive transference etc.) to resume the free associative process. In “The Interpretation of Dreams”, Freud (1900) describes the self-observing attitude suppressing one’s critical faculty, leading to innumerable involuntary ideas emerging into consciousness, which “makes it possible to interpret both his pathological ideas and his dream- structures.” (ibid, p. 102). Applied clinically, Freud states: “We therefore tell him that the success of the psycho-analysis depends on his noticing and reporting whatever comes into his head and not being misled, for instance, into suppressing an idea because it strikes him as unimportant or irrelevant or because it seems to him meaningless. He must adopt a completely impartial attitude to what occurs ( Einfällt ) to him, (1900, p.101; Italics added). In “Freud’s Psychoanalytical Procedure” (Freud [Strachey]1904), Strachey points out that during that period Freud still retained some reminiscence from the hypnotic treatment era, such as the patient's eyes being closed, but he would also abolish this shortly afterwards in 1903. (Ibid, p. 250, n.1). In “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life”, Freud (1901), brings up numerous examples of how free associative processes can lead to the underlying themes of sex and death which are usually warded off by repression. Trying to help a friend to find the reasons he had forgotten a word (and this way, to find the word itself), Freud introduced the method informally, “I must only ask you to tell me, candidly and uncritically , whatever comes into your mind if you direct your attention to the forgotten word without any definite aim.” (1901 , p. 9). This would be the same instruction given to patients undergoing analysis. By exploring other unconscious dimensions of the 'psychopathology of everyday life', such as slips of tongue, (consciously) unintended contradictory statements, forgetting of names of people, places or objects, etc., Freud explains the motivational reasons behind these phenomena: “It is pretty obvious that the consideration of ‘wandering’ speech images which lie below the threshold of consciousness and are not intended to be spoken, and the demand for information about everything that had been in the speaker's mind, are procedures which constitute a very close approach to the state of affairs in our ‘analyses’” (1901 b . p. 58). Two years later (1903) Freud writes, in the third person that ‘ Freud psychoanalytical procedure ’(1904 ) is to be included in Loewenfeld’s book on obsessional phenomena. Freud's description of the new technique elucidates the importance of the change that adopting the method of free association meant for psychoanalysis: “The changes which Freud introduced in Breuer's cathartic method of treatment were at first changes in technique; these, however, led to new findings and have finally necessitated a different though not contradictory conception of the therapeutic process (Freud, 1904, p. 250).

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