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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).
VII. INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVE: NEUROSCIENCE AND FREE ASSOCIATIONS
Summarizing the interdisciplinary research, Grotstein (1995) points out that Freud apparently “never realized that he had, in effect, discovered the right brain hemisphere!” (Grotstein 1995, p. 396). When a person lies down and does not make eye contact with the other person in the discourse, he or she seems to activate a cerebral hemispheric shift in terms of modes of data processing from the left to the right in right-handed persons and vice versa for left-handed persons. Correspondingly, researchers in infant observation also noted that there was a noticeable difference in infant alertness when the infant was observed sitting up as contrasted with lying down. This shift in the alertness of consciousness corresponded to electroencephalographic changes in states of alertness and also to a hemispheric shift. The shift is from a highly controlled, organized, linear, abstract mode to a looser, free-flowing, holistic/field-dependent mode. This ‘right-brain shift’ in the lying-down position in analysis would be manifested by the patient's free associations. These would be ‘free’ i.e., optimally disconnected from ‘left-brain editing’, censorship, and control, and would instead be increasingly organized by the unconscious. Some of notable North American contemporary psychoanalytically informed neuroscientific research relevant to free association derives its roots in Freud’s (1891) neurological study “On Aphasia”. Here, Freud posited that word meaning and word presentation needed to be distinguished if aphasic symptoms were to be accurately identified and understood. In this context, Freud’s later work on primary process mentation (Freud 1900, 1915) is a dynamic generalization of his previous proposition related specifically to aphasia. An example is the recent neuropsychoanalytic study of Villa, Shevrin, Songrass, Bazan and Brakel (2006), which specifically tests Freud’s hypothesis that word meaning and word presentation are functionally distinct when processed unconsciously (Freud 1891, 1915).
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