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associative and other behavior and experience. Most important among its components are the requirements surrounding the basic rule. The radical peculiarities of the analytic setting aim at a partial curtailment of action and the perception of external reality in order to induce processes of self-observation, displacement, and projection, i.e., a temporary diminution in reality testing. “And the requirement, moreover, to curtail censorship and yet to verbalize, to tell all the resulting self-observations to another person, makes the psychic processes of the analysand different from anything else in his life” (Loewenstein 1963, p. 458). Loewenstein agrees with Kris that the resulting psychic phenomena being similar to a dream-like state is only very remotely true. The process involved in free association does not have the wish-fulfilling or solitary character of the dream. It includes maintaining verbal communication with “the other in this venture”, as noted already more than 60 years prior by Freud (Freud 1899, in: Freud, E. 1960, p.239-240). Leopold Bellak (1961) , studied the structural aspects of the process of free associations, previously characterized by a certain type of ego function, called by Hartmann the self-exclusion of the ego , closely related to E. Kris 's 'regression in the service of the ego' (1939) . In addition, he considered responses (associations/projections) to the Rorschach Test and the T.A.T. He has identified a particular ego function he called the 'oscillating function of the ego '. As in the creative act, so in free associations, there is “a swing from regression to vigilance of cognitive, adaptive and synthetic functions. This produces emergent qualities which we know as the creative process” (ibid, p.13). Bellak concludes that the process of associating is predicated upon the ego's oscillating function—the ability to oscillate from regression in the service of the ego (as described by Kris) to a heightened acuity of self- observation, and of synthetic functioning. Bellak suggested a classification of the disturbances of free associations based on the disturbances of the first phase (regression) or the second phase (synthetic functioning) of such an oscillation. Following his earlier studies of affect and drives in free association, Rapaport (1967) made a further corrective contribution to the interpretation of causality and associative sequence: “If one idea follows another in a chain of free associations, …frequently the causal relationship…is reversed like this: “The cause of it, therefore after it’” (1976, p. 216). During the Post-World War II period of the so called ‘Hartmann era’ (Bergmann 2000), Ego Psychology directly or indirectly stimulated, and was reciprocally enriched by, child analytic and observational studies by Winnicott (1953), Spitz (1965), Jacobson (1964) and Mahler (1975), leading to an increased understanding of the pre-oedipal domain. Following Hartmann’s death in 1970, emphasis on object relations theory came further into prominence, and the era of theoretical pluralism set in (Blum, 1998). Within the next generations of the Freudian thinkers , there followed several overlapping developments: One was gradual ‘metapsychological modifications’, which elevated the use of the structural model and psychic conflict (Arlow & Brenner, 1964) and an extended view of compromise formation (Brenner 1976, 1982, 2006).
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