IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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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 Lewis (Lew) Aron (1990) would later extend and specify this interactive aspect for his two-person relational model of free associations (see below). This dimension could also be viewed as close to the notion of reverie of North American Bionian thinkers James Grotstein (1995) and Lawrence Brown (2012). Among the functions of free associations, such as to recall what has been forgotten, to regain lost experiences, to complete mourning, to expand what is condensed, to put thoughts and feelings into words, to elucidate inner conflict, to clarify confusion and to reverse disorientation, Kris stresses the common element - “the promotion of continuity” (Kris 1982, p. 14). As psychoanalysis has demonstrated that components of psychopathology invariably include significant limitations in freedom of associations, Kris “offers a substantial approach to the resolution of psychopathology by focusing upon the limitations and disorders of free associations” (Kris 1982, p. 4). Among other contributions, Kris (1985) developed a notion of the ‘divergent conflict’, analysis of which included the working through of the resistances to mourning of the lost object (one of the two alternatives where there cannot be a compromise). Such working through includes “repeated painful alterations of the associations, expressing longing for one side and the inner need to acknowledge the reality of the loss of the other” (Kris 1985, p. 553). The enduring contribution of Kris remains the use of free associations as the basis of the curative process of psychoanalytic treatment in restoration of psychic continuity. III. Ab. Conceptual Expansion and Expansion of Representational Capacity In part owing to the widening scope of patients treated with analytic therapy, various approaches to an expanding representational and symbolization capacity that are relevant to free associations have emerged. The enlarged purview of free associations included visual images (Kanzer 1958, Warren 1961), nonverbal cues derived from body posture and movements on the couch (McLaughlin 1987, 1991), as well as occasional invitation for the patient to draw something that they found difficult to put into words (Slap 1976, Brakel 1993). Hans Loewald’s (1971,1975) description of language action , where the patient’s words are meant to do something , not communicate something, added another dimension to understanding how patient’s use free association. That is, what he described is how patients use words to attempt to bore, seduce, anger etc. the analyst. Writing on the free associative processes in relation to the transference enactments, Loewald (1975) states: “The unfolding of the transference neurosis as re-enactment proceeds, in a more traditional analysis, by way of the analyst's interpreting interferences with the flow of

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