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specifies how the analyst experiences the patient ‘from inside’ of his own internal world, what he feels when he is with him, when he listens to him, what the patient ‘makes the analyst feel and sense’ and what the patient evokes/provokes in him, even at a psychosomatic level (as exemplified in the work of Lutenberg above in VB).
VI.THE USE OF FREE ASSOCIATION OUTSIDE OF THE THERAPEUTIC CONTEXT
Björn Salomonsson's (2012) method, used to reflect associatively on clinical material presented in a group setting, is becoming only gradually known across the three regions. Indirect descendant of ‘Balint’s Groups’ (Balint and Balint 1976/77) where medical practitioners discussed their countertransference, free associating to each other’s material, Swedish Salomonsson’s proposal consists of reading clinical material in a group of psychoanalysts and then asking one of the participants to associate freely, as if he were on the couch; the author calls this method "weaving thoughts", which stimulates thinking while in a state of uncertainty. The author does not advise practicing it on beginner candidates, as this procedure combines psychoanalytic technique with teaching and research. This combination may cause confusion in younger candidates who may feel exposed or in wild analysis, as it is a non-therapeutic context. Similar methods of group peer clinical consultation of senior analysts, relying in part on free association of the participants, have been employed for decades in the North American Center for Advanced Psychoanalytic Studies (CAPS) since its founding in 1960. Some clinical research working groups, established and sponsored by the International Psychoanalytical Association IPA, called Working Parties (WP) have found that in their clinical workshops they need the exercise of free association to achieve their method and model of work. More specifically, it is used by the Working Parties working group on Specificity of Psychoanalysis. In their last report at the London 2019 congress, Ana Maria Chabalgoity and Cesar Luis de Souza Brito (2019) state: "Let us recall that one of the main hypotheses that sustained the birth of this WP, and which we believe is still valid, is to conceive the production of a group of analysts working for a long time on the same material as a sounding board of the transferable dynamics of the reported analytic treatment. This hypothesis has allowed us to focus our research on conceiving "the free association of psychoanalysts in clinical discussion groups as a psychoanalytic method of investigation of the unconscious" (p.2).
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