Back to Table of Contents
been ‘transformed’ and modified, especially with the proposal of a more active involvement on the part of the analyst in working with patients with complex personality disorders. For instance, in the case of borderline patients, additional tools to free association have been developed, such as working with enactment and ‘figurability’. Latin American analysts stress that free association and free-floating attention are part of a broad context of framing and bonding, favoring the communication of unconscious contents by the patient and their technical management by the analyst. The original concept of free association as a fundamental rule of the psychoanalytic process has also been extended to situations outside clinical experience, such as in clinical research methods. In spite of its pre-analytic roots, the original psychoanalytic concept of free association arises from a clinical fact. It needs to be defined and differentiated from other related concepts. Once so defined, it can be enriched, developed and other elements can be added, without reaching saturation and denaturalization. In the context of Latin American conceptual research, it can be summarily stated that the concept has reached its completeness when it begins to run the risk of denaturalization, as has happened with other concepts in psychoanalysis. In this vein, in order not to lose its clinical- theoretical specificity, free association needs to be differentiated from related concepts which may have been born out of it, such as enactment and figurability. Across all regions , post-Freudian developments of the concept of free association point to its continued relevance in contemporary psychoanalysis. As psychoanalysis reaches patients of a ‘wider scope’ with traumatic histories, complex personality disorders, psychosomatic problems with impaired symbolization and representational processes, interest across regions has branched out into intense study of the different steps in developing the capacity to represent and symbolize. Reaching ‘pre-psychic’, pre-symbolic, and pre-representational experiential domain and ‘translating it’ into the patients’ inner world of primary process symbolism of dreams accessible to free association, may require more prominent participation of the analyst (special attunement to trust and safety, reverie, ‘co-dreaming’, subtle enactments etc.).To what degree this trend represents a conceptual expansion and /or transformation in service of restoration of psychic growth, inner structuralization and psychic continuity, and to what degree it needs to be differentiated from the concept of free association, so free association does not lose its specificity, remains a controversy among regions and different theoretical orientations, an area in need of further research.
See also: CONFLICT CONTAINMENT COUNTERTRANSFERENCE
423
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online