IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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patient something that I did not know and that he did not know himself. How could one hope to elicit it? (1910a, p.:22). He goes on to describe his method in a way that although he has abandoned pressure and direct suggestion, still uses the authority of the doctor who says that the patient 'knows' about what he finds difficult to talk about. “I insisted on my patients nevertheless telling me what occurred [Strachey’s footnote] to them in connection with the subject under discussion, and assured them that they really knew everything that they had ostensibly forgotten and that the idea that occurred to them would infallibly contain what we were in search of” [1910 a . SE: 11: 29]. By abandoning hypnosis and the suggestion, Freud introduces an important change in psychoanalytic technique in that he lets the patient speak. But the implicit influence of the analyst's authority is still perceptible. Worth noting is the inherent paradox of the fundamental rule, ’the demand for freedom’: ‘talk about whatever occurs to you’. By 1912, Freud’s “ fundamental rule ” of psychoanalysis was implemented by asking patients to say whatever entered their mind (ideas, feelings, body sensations, dreams) with as little restraint as possible, i.e., without censorship. Between 1912 and 1915, in the series of the Papers on Technique, Freud elaborates on the interplay between the associative process on the part of the patient, and the corresponding complementary listening and interpretive process on the part of the analyst – the pillars structuring the psychoanalytic situation and the psychoanalytic process. In “The Dynamic of the Transference” (1912b ), when discussing transference as resistance, he states that the patient “disregards the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis which lays it down that whatever comes into one's head must be reported without criticizing it,” (1912b , p.107). According to Strachey “This seems to be the first use of what was henceforward to become the regular description of the essential technical rule.” (1912b, p. 107. n.2). In another paper on technique, “Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho- Analysis”, Freud links the patient's free association with the complementary counterpart for the analyst. He once more refers to 'the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis’ in the following terms: “[patient] should communicate everything that occurs [ einfällt ] to him without criticism or selection” [1912a, p.112] . Or a few pages later : “…the patient must relate everything that his self-observation can detect, and keep back all the logical and affective objections that seek to induce him to make a selection from among them” [1912a, p. 115]. Regarding the complementary rule for the analyst, Freud asserts: [the analyst has] “to give equal notice to everything”’, stating:

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