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(process), inviting patients to reflect on that experience, thereby giving the patient's self- reflection a central role (Gray 1973, 1982; Kris 1982, Busch 2011). Others listen for the unconscious themes (content) underlying a sequence of associations. (Loewenstein 1963; Arlow 1979a, b; Lothane 2018). Still others (Joseph 1985), integrate both approaches, focusing on the changes from one moment to the next and the unconscious themes underlying a sequence of associations, which is more in line with optimal contemporary clinical analytic practice across the board, as today it is a matter of relative focus rather than exclusive focus, taking into account many other specific factors (Blum 2016, 2019).
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: For Jacques Lacan (1966), the accent was on fantasies making up the contents of the unconscious. This fostered a different style of clinical listening: listening for indications of a fantasy disguised in the free associations. The analyst's attention should be on the words themselves and on the unspoken between them. In defining the practice of psychoanalysis it is, above all, the fundamental rule, the principle of ‘free association , ’ that establishes its uniqueness. The fundamental rule introduces the idea that a form of communication or discourse is to be attempted that is different from any other discourse. The appreciation of this form of discourse, the idea that truth must reside there, is fundamental to psychoanalysis, truth defined as new utterances that attain authority. It is the analyst's task to create a discursive setting where this improvisatory speech can occur. Lacanian interest is not language per se . It is the limits, where language fails. The unconscious reveals itself in the traces it leaves, when it passes into words that we are able to grasp it. Additionally, the unconscious works in accordance with the linguistic figures of metonymy and metaphor. Listening for the pauses, gaps, periods and parallelisms, the analyst listens for the moments of ‘full speech’ within the ‘empty speech’ (ordinary social discourse). Free association brings the imaginary identities into being, making it possible to assimilate them into the symbolic. "the autonomy of the symbolic, is the only one that allows freeing the theory and practice of free association in psychoanalysis from its misunderstandings…” (1966, p. 52). (See also a separate entry (THE UNCONSCIOUS) In Joseph Sandler’s and Anna Freud's "of the Analysis of Defense: The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense Revisited" (1985), a follow up of A. Freud’s (1936) "The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense", 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, Sandler (1992) takes into account that, especially before the advent of the
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