Back to Table of Contents
revolutionary element of the psychoanalytic method. Bion, on the other hand, taking Freudian ideas on free association for granted, develops the other part of the fundamental rule, that of the analyst. Although some of his ideas about mental states in the analyst could be applied to the patient when activating free association, which justifies their inclusion in this entry in the following sense. Wilfrid Bion argues that emotional experience is ephemeral, cannot be stored, and is therefore impossible to remember as it is instantaneous and present. Only sensory experience can be remembered, i.e., that which is felt and captured through one of the five senses: one can remember songs or movies or cities or perfumes that bring back evocations of moments, persons or situations; and this memory awakens an emotional experience, but this is not remembered, it is activated (Bion, 1992). Moreover, when the patient is capable of alpha dream work, the emotional experience is paired with visual images (pictograms) and transforms them into alpha elements that can be stored and remembered in the form of an ideogram that combines an emotion with a pictogram or abstraction of a sensory register. This conjunction of sensory and emotional experience is combined in different ways: evocative of past , present and future experiences that form "the mind's eye" necessary for the imagination and insight : a cognitive emotional grammar that develops in the primary bond . The failure of this grammar as an intuitive matrix "of the self" manifests itself in the form of emotional disconnection and isolation. Christopher Bollas has made a contribution to free association, which he prefers to call 'free talking’, in a volume devoted to the subject. For him, when Freud introduce free association into the psychoanalytic session, "he referred the monological nature of solitary inner discourse to the dialogical structure of a bipersonal relationship..." (2002, p. 7). ‘Free association’ is a compromise formation between psychic truth and the self-effort to avoid the pain of such truth (p: 10), it is not a single chain of thoughts, but rather multiples lines of psychic interest (p: 17). The revolutionary Freudian method includes, alongside free association, a new way of listening to the patient through the analyst's evenly floating attention: The only way to achieve unconscious communication between patient and analyst. Both elements, the ‘Freudian Pair’, as Bollas calls it, are recognised by most analysts as a crucial key to the analytic method. Bollas envisages two forms of free association by the patient corresponding two forms of listening by the analyst. One, the Freudian, in which the manifest associative material is not directly unconscious, but a thick disguise. A long discursive sequence of the patient will be necessary before the analyst finds the unconscious meaning. The other form of free association and listening is that of Melanie Klein and her followers where the patient free associates by using 'objects' to stand in for 'parts' of the self in relation to his or her mental objects, usually different forms of representations of other people. The object relation technique perspective accepts the manifest text as an accurate picture of parts of the self. Bollas argues that contemporary psychoanalysis tends to oscillate between these two perspectives:
403
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online