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Freud’s statement from 1926 presents essentially an extension of the papers on technique from 1914: “If the resistance is itself unconscious, as so often happens owing to its connection with the repressed material, we make it conscious. If it is conscious, or, where it has become conscious, we bring forward logical arguments against it; we promise the ego rewards and advantages if it will give up its resistance. …we find that even after the ego has decided to relinquish its resistances it still has difficulty in undoing the repressions; and we have called the period of strenuous effort which follows after its praiseworthy decision, the phase of ‘working-through’. …after the ego resistance has been removed, the power of the compulsion to repeat—the attraction exerted by the unconscious prototypes upon the repressed instinctual process—has still to be overcome” (Freud 1926, p.159). In 1931, in his Letter to Stephan Zweig, Freud summed up free association as “the most important contribution made by psychoanalysis, the methodological key to its results” (1931, p. 403). In “ An Autobiographical Study ” (1935), Freud recounts his departure from the initial approach of overcoming the patient's resistance through insistence and encouragement, and gives an example of an instruction to free association as ‘saying whatever comes to one’s head’, without conscious control, suspending ‘critical objections’: “I gave place to another method which was in one sense its opposite. Instead of urging the patient to say something upon some particular subject, I now asked him to abandon himself to a process of free association —that is, to say whatever came into his head, while ceasing to give any conscious direction to his thoughts […] he should bind himself to report literally everything that occurred [ Einfällt ] to his self-perception and not to give way to critical objections” (1935, p.40) (Italics added) While earlier works attributed the ‘non-free’ nature of 'free association' to the determining factor of mental phenomena (1922, p.238), Freud (1935) emphasizes progressively more and more the influence of the analytic situation itself, which can be interpreted as underscoring the importance of the transference. “We must, however, bear in mind that free association is not really free. The patient remains under the influence of the analytic situation even though he is not directing his mental activities on to a particular subject.” (1935, p. 40). In the same text, he adds that in addition to saving work, the free association method has other advantages over the previous method. There is less coercion, no loss of contact with the current situation and nothing is introduced of the analyst's expectations. Therefore, “It is left to the patient in all essentials to determine the course of the analysis and the arrangement of the material” (1935, p. 41)
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