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A nuanced assessment of unconscious ego operations allows for individualized modification of technique for those who demonstrate some interference with one or more ego capacity. The assessment of the etiology (conflict or deficit) of such interferences in ego operations assists in determining individualized technique, including free association. Of the contemporary 26 autonomous ego functions , clustered and summarized for diagnostic purposes in terms of deficit and/or inhibition by Blackman (2003, 2010), those deemed to be most relevant for the purpose of calibrating the instruction and use of free association include perception and memory, integrative-synthetic capacities, secondary process, reality testing, judgement about danger and anticipation of consequences, autoplastic and alloplastic adaptation, movement from play to work, abstraction ability, observing ego, executive functioning. Additionally, ‘capacity for empathy’ (Buie, 1981) is also relevant to free associations. Somewhat different from basic functions, ego strengths comprise delay and control capacities. Ego strengths usually considered most relevant to the free associations are impulse control (delay of gratification), affect regulation, containment of primary process, tension and frustration tolerance, capacity for development of sublimatory channels, using fantasy as trial action, and adaptive regression in the service of the ego / “ARISE” (Bellack 1989). In addition, a modicum of superego functioning has been considered an important indicator of the utility of free associations ever since Kurt Eissler (1958) noted that delinquents, if induced to free associate, would produce mostly undisguised id derivatives (primary process fantasies of sex and violence). The conceptualization of free associations has changed with the evolution of the conceptualization of the conflict, signal affects and specification of ego capacities: The affects generated by reality/ realangst, (Freud, 1926) and by intrapsychic conflict were later expanded to include, besides anxiety (Freud 1926, Rangell 1976), also depressive affect (Brenner 1982) and anger (Blackman, 2010). Either traumatic or signal affects can cause the mind to mobilize autonomous ego functioning to manage a conflict. At other times, when confronted by affects, the mind may institute constellations of defensive operations which shut some aspect of the affect (thought and sensation) or the conflict out of consciousness (Brenner 1982). Defenses can be used together with autonomous ego functions towards an ‘adaptive’ solution (Brenner, reporter, 1975). From the Post-Freudian Structural theory (Ego psychology and Modern Conflict theory) point of view, for those patients who show adequate abstraction and integration capacities, capacity to trust, a modicum of superego functioning (guilt and/or shame), and an appreciable degree of containment of primary process functioning, the recommendation by the analyst to free associate while reclining on a couch (Kravis 2018) stimulates non-linear routes to their unconscious life. Unconscious conflicts giving rise to compromise formations cannot be deciphered in a linear way. They need to be divined and then deconstructed via free
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