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Jacobs 1995, Renik 1995), the authors highlight how the radical nature of the two fundamental structural pillars of the psychoanalytic situation - free association and analytic neutrality - create an extraordinary therapeutic interaction, “providing stability in the wake of the regressive and progressive currents of the psychoanalytic process” (Adler & Bachant, p. 1023). Here, the instruction to engage in free association is formulated as “an extensive expressive license that guarantees the opportunity … to speak spontaneously without respect for conventional ideas of tact, propriety, or thematic organization” (ibid., p. 1023). There is an acknowledgement of the inherent struggle, if not impossibility, of following the instruction; yet paradoxically, restating Freud (1916-1917), “this very struggle provides the most advantageous circumstance to observe…and master the chronically inhibiting pressures which constrict the fullness of psychic life” (Adler and Bachant 1996, p. 1024). The free associative process provides access to the deepest strata of the unconscious, “linkages to the body and bodily sensations that are often bypassed in approaches that give priority to the patient’s subjective representation of relational experience” (Gill 1995). The authors agree with A. Kris (1982) that the lost connections with the body and between various elements of his/her mind are fortified as the patient can be helped more to possess his/her free associations. For Adler and Bachant, both the relational and intrapsychic aspects of free association are understood as structured in a unique configuration of the analytic process that “allows the patient to have an introspective encounter with his or her deepest emotional stirrings in the context of an interaction with another person” (p. 1026). As structured by free association, such interaction evokes an early mother-child asymmetrical intimacy, inevitably linking the analyst to the ‘mother of separation’ (Stone 1961). As the free association is an ideal that can only be approximated, significant obstacles which provide a relevant point of departure of analytic inquiry will emerge. When identified, such points of derailment of free association offer an opportunity to explore emotional blockages that constitute the fabric of defensive structure, which emerge in the psychoanalytic process as resistances, including self-judging tendencies mobilized in the context of the evocative object relationship (Boesky 1990, Gray 1994). Working in this manner as a participant-observer of one’s own internal process, patients can achieve temporary distance from intense impulses and feelings, which is a crucial ego function pivotal in emotional maturation (Hartmann 1951, Nunberg 1960, Adler and Bachant 1996, Blackman 2003, 2010). Through this effort, an enhanced sense of personal agency, countering passive trends and contributing to the growing capacity for reflection, develops. Additionally, authors contend that as an interpretative tool, free association, together with empathy, provides a reliable source of information that outweighs even resources of theoretical knowledge. Another important and potentially controversial aspect that the authors consider is a cluster of issues surrounding ‘giving the analyst privileged access to one’s inner life’: the expressive freedom comes at the price of forfeiting an appreciable degree of privacy. In working with patients whose capacity to trust has been compromised early in life, where personal autonomy is a tenuous achievement, the authors agree with Pine (1985) and Winnicott (1956), recognizing that the therapist may need to “fundamentally adapt the treatment situation around the vulnerability of the patient” (Adler and Bachant 1996, p. 1029).
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