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the verbal flow of each session focuses on transference analysis revolving around concerns for the analyst’s possible judgmental reactions, within the modern conflict theory paradigm. However, Gray’s perspective continually came up against what Paniagua (2001) described as the attraction of topographically based diving into the unconscious, thus forgoing Freud’s second theory of anxiety. Further, Gray became more insistent over the years that this was the only way to uncover unconscious resistances, and that nothing else was needed to allow unconscious fantasies to emerge. Some critics (Phillips 2006) argued that Gray overemphasized the role of aggression in mental life, privileged ego resistance over id resistance, and, while his method was suitable for analyzing repression, it was not applicable to other forms of defense like splitting or denial. These factors, along with the growing interest in working analytically with the wider scope of patients, where the various facets of the analytic relationship and related features of transference-countertransference field gain prominence, contributed to the diminishing of the influence of Gray’s method. However, Gray’s ‘microstructural model’ of the use of the method of free association to capture and analyze the ego’s versatile defensive complexity remains an enduring contribution. Anton Kris (1982) viewed his approach as a clinical specification and elaboration of the line of thought initiated by Freud and extended by Rapaport (1944), Greenson (1967), Gray (1973) Blum (1979) and Loewenstein (1981). Greater freedom in free associations was then among the goals of treatment, based upon and in keeping with Freud’s (1914) realization that what led to the ongoing enactment of unconscious conflict was what couldn’t be allowed into awareness. Kris maintained that free association remained the fundamental tool to investigate the human mind. He examined the method and process of free association, viewing it as a source of data as well as the point of departure for clinical formulation. He focused on many varieties and functions of free associations, highlighting the significance of its developmental focus. In adumbrating his different uses of the term, Kris distinguishes the freedom from conscious, purposeful, directed organization of thoughts, feelings and sensations, from the freedom from unconscious restriction of the resistance. There are differences also in the form, style or modality, including not only verbal associations, but also tone, pace, movements and gestures, as to how thoughts, feelings, memories and sensations are expressed. The free associative process itself progresses from preconscious layers of seemingly single determinants (e.g. a long-forgotten fear) towards multi-layered patterns of conflicting determinants buried deeply in the unconscious strata of mental life (as expressed in multi-determined transferences, enactments, dreams, and character patterns). Kris notes that while the patient is one determiner of the varieties and forms of free associations, the analyst is another. In defining transference and countertransference in terms of free associations, Kris comes close to potential interactive- intersubjective implications when he states: “The free association method requires of the analyst a willingness to be involved to some extent in the irrational drama…for transference exerts a tension between an adult experience and child experience …on both the analyst as well as on the patient…In such a conception, the analyst’s associations would form the basis of the definition” (ibid,, p. 70). A noted relational theorist Lew Aron (1990) would later extend and
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