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Freud now sets aside his preoccupation with the symptom and encourages the patient to speak. He lets the patient choose the subject of the day's session and thus begin with any surface that reveals the patient's unconscious. In his “Introductory Lectures” (Freud 1916-1917), and thereafter, ‘consciousness’ can be understood to mean ‘the surface of the unconscious (1916- 1917. Pp.:287; 1920, p.238). He then elaborates the advantages of abandoning hypnosis; not all patients are susceptible to hypnosis, and not all therapists have the ability to employ it. Consequently, the new method can be applied to a significant number of patients. But, when leaving hypnosis, the expanded consciousness that supplies the forgotten memories is lost. Nonetheless, “Freud found such a substitute—and a completely satisfactory one—in the ‘associations’ of his patients; that is, in the involuntary thoughts (most frequently regarded as disturbing elements and therefore ordinarily pushed aside) which so often break across the continuity of a consecutive narrative” (Freud, 1904, p.251). Strachey uses quotation marks around 'association' because it is a translation of 'Einfällen,' which – as he clarifies – more accurately conveys the notion of occurrence or involuntary thought. Freud also outlines how he formulates the request to the patient to collaborate in this method: “In order to secure these ideas and associations he asks the patient to ‘let himself go’ in what he says, ‘as you would do in a conversation in which you were rambling on quite disconnectedly and at random’ […] they must include in it whatever comes into their heads, even if they think it is unimportant or irrelevant or nonsensical […] or embarrassing or distressing. “[1904, p. 251] In applying free associative method this way, Freud observed something important for his theory: that there are gaps in the patient's memory, due to a process of repression, and that any attempt to uncover them meets with resistance. In 1909, writing on the obsessional neurosis of the ‘Rat Man’, Freud described a mode of an analyst’s listening, which is an indispensable counterpart to the patient’s free associations: The analyst listens not only to the manifest message imparted to him, but also to a concealed one unknown even to its bearer. He learns only gradually, in each individual case, to understand this hidden message and its relation to the manifest one. It includes “…listening to what is being said; to how it is being said, when and in what context it is being said; to what is not said, but deliberately or unwittingly omitted; and finally, to the absence of communication—listening to silence” (Loewenstein 1963). In “Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis” (1910 a ), Freud provides the following retrospective account of the development of the method: Since I was not able at will to alter the mental state of the majority of my patients [through hypnosis], I set about working with them in their normal state. At first, I must confess, this seemed a senseless and hopeless undertaking. I was set the task of learning from the
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