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situation of trust between the patient and analyst so that the patient may feel sufficiently safe to suspend their suppression defense and thereby associate and speak freely… The quality of an individual's free associations depends very much on the interpersonal environment” (Dorpat 1999, p. 141). As is the case with many other contemporary writers from all schools of thought, Dorpat maintains that the ability for free association designates that one has reached a state of sufficient psychic freedom of speaking freely and openly to another person. He recommends that instead of the ‘rule’ of free associations, clinicians should encourage people to speak freely and to help create an interpersonal environment where patients feel safe enough to do so. Additionally, not entirely unlike Kris (1982), he proposes free association to be viewed as a goal of therapy to strive for, not a rule or a requirement. Irwin Z. Hoffman (2006) challenges the traditional view of ‘free association’ from a relational-constructivist perspective. In the Relational perspective in general, free association is complemented to a greater degree by a kind of free unfolding of the interaction, including transference-countertransference enactments as forms of expression that become the objects of critical reflection and that provide avenues for therapeutic action. A fierce critic of the traditional conceptualizations of free association and transference, Hoffman argues that it entails three forms of denial, formulated in terms of corresponding myths: 1) denial of the patient's free agency; 2) denial of the patient's and the analyst's mutual interpersonal influence; and 3) denial of the patient's share of responsibility for co-constructing the analytic relationship. Viewing free association as an example of a concept that strips the patient of responsible agency and therefore of any ‘blame or credit’ for his or her contributions, Hoffman’s aspiration is the establishment of “a climate that encourages a mix of (1) habitual/ characterological, (2) regressive/underlying, and (3) imaginative/new constructions of the interaction, on the one hand, and critical reflection on the constructive process itself, on the other” (Hoffman 2006, p.52). It follows that insight is thus embedded in a multifaceted relationship, the whole of which offers a complex kind of corrective experience. Lewis Aron (1989, 1990) decried what he saw as an unfortunate dichotomy between psychoanalysts who have retained a one-person, intrapsychic, drive-structure model of the mind, who have continued to emphasize the free association method, and those who have shifted to a relational, two-person, interactional or interpersonal point of view and often minimized or abandoned the free association and replaced it with a focus on the therapeutic interaction. Aron strove to reconceptualize the free associations method within the context of a two-person relational framework. He wrote: “Free association, as a method, can be useful to psychoanalysts of all theoretical orientations as a reminder of Freud's most important discoveries, that is, of unconscious mental life, psychic determinism, psychic continuity, and meaning, as well as of the value and priority of careful, restrained, and disciplined listening to patients and of taking our lead from them” (Aron 1990, p.439).
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