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particular area of a ‘focal’ problem. This is to be differentiated from TFT with borderline patients of Kernberg et al., as noted above (Caligor, Kernberg et al. 2018).
III. D. FREE ASSOCIATIVE ACTIVITY OF THE ANALYST Many conceptions of the analyst’s free associative activity derive from Freud’s previously mentioned ‘telephone metaphor’ of 1912, in which Freud focused on the inner experience of the analyst as the guidepost to the proper understanding of the patient's mental life. Otto Isakower ( 1963) advanced an almost concretistic view of this process in his concept of ‘the analyzing instrument’. According to Isakower, if the analyst had been properly analyzed himself, the correct interpretation would appear automatically in the analyst's mind in the form of a free association. Although it would seem that Isakower tried to give spatial dimension and material structure to ‘the analyzing instrument’, some argue (Arlow 1979a) his concept of ’the analyzing instrument’ was identical to Freud's original concept of the system Unconscious. Through the process of intuition, the correct interpretation rose into consciousness very much as a derivative of an unconscious instinctual impulse would make its appearance in the mind of the patient. Jacob Arlow (1979b) delineates three internal processes participating in the genesis of an analytic interpretation: introspection, intuition, and empathy. He describes a multifaceted and layered chain of events where the analyst’s internal position oscillates between the rather passive observer and the active participant and interpreter. An analyst’s free associative processes play a prominent role in such a chain of events. First, Arlow notes, the analyst makes an identification with the patient, allowing for the intrusion of the ‘extraneous’ thought into his mind. Second, the analyst's free associations represent his inner commentary and the beginning of his perception of the patient's unconscious thought processes. Third, the analyst's free association represents a form of inner communication to himself, a first step in the awareness of the insight which he is about to apprehend. Fourth, what the analyst has perceived through introspection is the end result of a process of intuition. Intuition consists of being able to organize silently, effortlessly, and outside of consciousness the myriad of observations, impressions, facts, and experiences which encompass the wide range of verbal and nonverbal modes of experience: behavior, facial expressions, body posture, gestures, timbre of the voice, rate of speech, metaphoric expressions, and the configuration of the material, of all which are perceived sometimes subliminally and are elaborated and conceptualized unconsciously i.e., intuitively. Such a mode of an analyst’s functioning is judged by Arlow to be intensely aesthetic and creative. Stanley Leavy (1973) summed up the interaction between the patient's metaphoric speaking and the analyst's metaphoric listening in the following terms: “Free association … is indispensable for analysts, since it is the inner process whereby, we pass from ‘free-floating’ attention to the dissolution of verbal statements and the re-
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