Back to Table of Contents
In 1923, Freud wrote the “Two Encyclopaedia articles”, providing a lucid explanation of Free Association and The Fundamental Technical Rule , in distinct sections. Regarding Free Association , once again employing the third person, he writes: “The effect of the hypnotic condition upon the patient had been so greatly to increase his ability to make associations that he was able straight away to find the path—inaccessible to his conscious reflection—which led from the symptom to the thoughts and memories connected with it. (1923 a , p. 237-238). When Freud abandoned hypnosis, he thought that he would obtain such associations if he forcibly enough insisted that his unhypnotized patients give him their associations. However, he later realized that this pressure was unnecessary, as the patients came up naturally with many ideas. Nonetheless, occasional objections arose, preventing the communication of certain thoughts. Freud established the hypothesis - which he later confirmed – “that everything that occurred [ Einfällen ] to a patient setting out from a particular starting-point must also stand in an internal connection with that starting-point; (1923 a , p. 238). Hence the technique of ‘educating’ the patient, “to give up the whole of his critical attitude and of making use of the material which was thus brought to light for the purpose of uncovering the connections that were being sought. (1923 a , p.238). He ends the section on 'Free association' with the statement that, “A strong belief in the strict determination of mental events played a part in the choice of this technique as a substitute for hypnosis” (ibid, 238). The subsequent paragraph in the article states that the procedure of "free association" constitutes the "fundamental technical rule of psychoanalysis". And he restates what had been previously expressed in earlier works: “The treatment is begun by the patient being required to put himself in the position of an attentive and dispassionate self-observer, merely to read off all the time the surface of his consciousness, and on the one hand to make a duty of the most complete honesty while on the other not to hold back any idea from communication, even if (1) he feels that it is too disagreeable or if (2) he judges that it is nonsensical or (3) too unimportant or (4) irrelevant to what is being looked for. It is uniformly found that precisely those ideas which provoke these last-mentioned reactions are of particular value in discovering the forgotten material” (1923, p. 238). In “A Short Account of Psychoanalysis”, Freud (1924) formulates the method of free association in the following way, emphasizing that accessing the unconscious requires tracing the conscious surface. “… Freud… pledged his patients to refrain from any conscious reflection and to abandon themselves, in a state of quiet concentration, to following the ideas which occurred [ Einfällt ] to them spontaneously (involuntarily) — ‘to skim off the surface of their consciousness’. They were to communicate these ideas to the physician even if they felt objections to doing so, if, for instance, the thoughts seemed too disagreeable, too
368
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online