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Two prominent early child analysts Melanie Klein and Anna Freud agreed that young children cannot ‘free associate’ verbally, because their language and their self-reflective capacity was not sufficiently developed. However, their views on child’s play with objects in reference to free association differed: M. Klein (1926, 1927) maintained that the use of the technique of children's spontaneous play could correspond to the adult's method of free association to access the unconscious domain, as she demonstrated in her work. The unconscious symbolism of dreams was here substituted and expressed by symbolic play with the toy-objects. In her later work Klein puts it more clearly: “…from the start the child expressed his phantasies and anxieties mainly in play, and I consistently interpreted its meaning to him, with the result that additional material came up in his play. […] This approach corresponds to a fundamental principle of psychoanalysis—free association” (Klein, 1955, p. 123). Anna Freud (1936), who proceeded to further refine her father’s structural theory and structural conflict, did not see child-play as a symbolic equivalent to free association. In “The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense” (1936) she presented a modified picture of what analysts can expect to learn from an adult patient attempting to comply with the fundamental rule. In a logical extension of Freud's discovery of the paramount significance of unconscious psychic conflicts, and of his insistence on the importance of analyzing resistances, she stated: “… what concerns us is not simply the enforcement of the fundamental rule of analysis for its own sake but the conflict to which this gives rise” [A. Freud 1936, p. 15]. Echoing Freud’s caution about limiting the ‘analytic pact’ to non-psychotic individuals, Paul Federn (1934), writing on psychoses, indicated the danger in liberal usage of free associations by a ‘pre-schizophrenic patient’, leading to weakening their already tenuous hold on reality. Harry Stack Sullivan , who early in his career praised the method of free association as the technique of choice for the study of the subjective sequence of events (Sullivan 1938), became gradually more reserved towards its applicability for severely disturbed patients, with whom he felt free associations interfered with genuine communication, and consequently frequently substituted free associations with a detailed inquiry (Sullivan 1953). Working with clinically depressed patients with a great propensity for severe regression to an oral-narcissistic stage with a ‘loss of their object relation’ to the analyst, Sandor Lorand (1937), combining Freud and Ferenczi, argued that treatment temporarily requires increased flexibility and activity on the part of the analyst. David Rapaport (1950, 1951, 1958), who called free associations “spontaneous- effortless thinking” (1951, p. 718), initiated detailed exploration of the organizing function of affects and drives on the associative complex. In his theories of motivation and memory, Rapaport identified the motivational force of underlying affectivity joining the links of the associative chain.
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