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III. A. FREE ASSOCIATION AS CENTRAL TO PSYCHOANALYTIC WORK III. Aa. Analyzing Resistances and Restoration of Psychic Continuity: Paul Gray and Anton Kris The understanding of analyzing the resistances to free association remained obscured for many years, leading Roy Schafer (1983) to suggest, "Certain things about resisting which ought to be well known, and are said to be well known and sufficiently appreciated and applied, are in fact not known well enough and not consistently attended to in practice" (p. 66). Analyzing resistances was often presented as synonymous with bypassing resistances (Busch, 1992). In this climate, Paul Gray and Anton Kris’ contributions of 1982 had a profound effect on how analysts could think about, use, and conceptualize free association as central to the curative process in psychoanalysis (Gray, 1982; Kris, 1982). While Gray focused on utilizing the free associations method in elucidating defense and resistance activities of the unconscious ego, Kris elaborated on multiple functions of free associative processes in the restoration of psychic continuity. Paul Gray (1973, 1982, 1986, 1987, 1990, 1994) elaborated on psychoanalytically systematic ways of identifying and analyzing resistances, based upon the patient’s use of the method of free association. Here, the analyst is interested in the functioning of the mind as it reveals itself through the free association method. In his earlier publications, Gray (1973) has put this most clearly in explicating that “the analyst's primary goal is always the analysis of the patient's psyche, not the patient's life” (p. 477). Gray's goal was to maintain a focus on the psychological reality “inside” the analysis. All else is viewed as a potential ‘defensive flight to reality’. The analyst is to focus on the flow of the associations, in order not to interfere with the development of the transference neurosis. For Gray, the analytic focus should remain exclusively on the moment-to-moment vicissitudes (‘close process monitoring’) of the analysand's free associations. This focus was judged by some (Philips 2006) as too narrow. In his classic paper on a “developmental lag” in psychoanalytic technique, Gray addresses the failure of contemporary psychoanalysis to assimilate and to apply the theoretical knowledge about the unconscious ego to intrapsychic life. He outlined the problem in the following way: “It has for some time been my conclusion, rightly or wrongly, that the way a considerable proportion of analysts listen to and perceive their data has, in certain significant respects, not evolved as I believe it would have if historically important concepts concerned with the defensive functions of the ego had been wholeheartedly allowed their place in the actual application of psychoanalytic technique” (Gray, 1982, p. 622). A decade later, Gray elucidated his method more fully, based upon the well-known clinical observation that often a patient will be associating, and suddenly there will be a shift. It could take the form of a change in affect, the patient suddenly falling silent, or changing the topic. Gray’s assumption was that this was potentially a moment when one could observe a resistance in operation. Gray’s (1994) ‘close process attention’ to the defensive functioning of
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