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development and to complexities of the psychoanalytic process, for this author the concept of free association remains an indispensable tool for the practice of psychoanalysis. Influential in French Canada, Andre Green (2000) discusses a particular quality of associative behavior observed in some borderline patients, and its role in maintaining a central defensive position, discernible in complex use by the analyst and a particular functioning of the mind that the author terms ‘phobic’. The author advances a new formulation of the free association method. By constructing an analytic space in which free association and psychoanalytic listening are possible, the analyst can voice and link previously catastrophic ideas, quite unknown to the patient's consciousness, to help the patient to create meaning and obtain relief from previously dominant but unknown terrors. The author links his clinical account both to his ideas on temporality and negativity and to the relationship between oedipal and pre-oedipal elements (p. 429). For Jaqueline Amati-Mehler , a North American trained, multi-lingual Spanish-Italian analyst influential in French Canada, the interplay between the different associations in different languages, and the interaction of new experiences with repression, results in the rearrangement of memories through the translation and transcription processes described by Freud in the context of the concept of Nachträglichkeit (Freud 1896). She underscores the importance of the detection of associative-linguistic shifts during the session. Some patients are unable to recall experiences in one language, but may suddenly be overtaken by repressed events by shifting language: the different linguistic codes can be at the service of the repressed, but also of the return of the repressed. “Analysis with multilingual patients will often render old associative paths viable again and, by virtue of its method of free association, will frequently enough create new pathways that enhance intrapsychic permeability within the analytic relationship” (Amati-Mehler 1995, p.100).
III. B. QUALIFIED USE OF FREE ASSOCIATION III. Ba. Considering Ego Operations and Object Relations
With advanced knowledge and clinical experience with patients of wide-ranging diagnostic scope, the contemporary scene is marked by complexity and nuance of the criteria under consideration as it is relevant to the introduction and utility of free association. In fact, as Martin Bergmann (1968) observed, while only starting with Anna Freud’s “The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense” it became possible to analyze resistances, the still later phase in managing free associations occurred with the attempt to widen the application of psychoanalytic therapy beyond classical neurosis. Studies of early maternal deprivation (Spitz 1950, Alpert 1954, 1959), attachment (Bowlby 1958, Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters and Wall 1978), and separation-individuation (Mahler, Pine and Bergmann 1975) point to a tenuous object-tie in the history of such depressed patients, with the implication for psychoanalytic technique, including conceptualization of transference and free association (Alpert 1959, Dorpat 2000, Kramer and Akhtar 1988). Among others,
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