Back to Table of Contents
V. DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPT IN LATIN AMERICA
V. A. INTERNATIONAL CONTRIBUTIONS INFLUENTIAL IN LATIN AMERICA Historically, the following international authors and conceptualizations of free association have been influential in Latin American developments of the concept: Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (1966), who maintained that 1-The term free association does not imply fluctuation, but rather, the ‘evenly hovering/floating’ attention to the symbolic mentation, referencing the German term ‘gleichschwebende’, (p. 194 T II.); 2- The analyst must sharpen his listening to the phonemes, syllables and words... without omitting the pauses, scansions, cuts, periods and parallelisms, for it is there that the word for word version is prepared... (p. 194.) 3- "the autonomy of the symbolic, is the only one that allows freeing the theory and practice of free association in psychoanalysis from its misunderstandings…” (p. 52 T II. Op. cit.). Joseph Sandler’s and Anna Freud's "Review of The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense" (1972-1973), a follow up of A. Freud’s (1936) "The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense", where the authors note the movement from the emphasis on free association toward the importance placed on transference. Understanding of the history of the concept development takes into account Sandler’s (1992) view that, especially before the advent of the structural theory (1923), free associations depicted how unconscious desires and impulses "would have made their way from the deep to the surface" (Sandler, p. 174). Ralph Greenson’s (1967) variety of resistances to free associative process, including when free association can be can at the service of resistance when the patient cannot stop the flow of solipsistic associations because of a collapse of particular ego functions; it is then up to the analyst to intervene to analyze such modes of resistances or to restore the flow of the association. Donald Winnicott ’s (1968) view that communication does not begin with the acquisition of language, but in the pre-verbal interaction (‘mutuality’), as the child's ability to play and symbolize precedes the use of words. Andre Green’s (2001, 2002a, 2006) analytic frame, comprising Neutrality, Abstinence, and Free association, in which he distinguishes ‘a variable fraction’ and ‘a constant fraction’. The constant fraction corresponds to the "active matrix" of a dialogical nature, consisting of the free association of the patient coupled with the free-floating attention/listening and the benevolent neutrality of the analyst. Dialogic matrix forms the core of the analytic action, whose agent is the analytic couple. The variable fraction constitutes a ‘protective case’ of the active matrix, and corresponds to the material, secondary dispositions, such as frequency, the patient's position, and the various aspects of the analytic contract. In "The central phobic position", Green (2002a) proposes a conception of free association (and free-floating attention) as ‘a coupled production of the analytic couple’: he defines discourse in session as a process
411
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online