Concept
Free association
Saying whatever comes to mind, without selection or censorship.
Development
1895
introduced by Sigmund Freud
In his chapter on the psychotherapy of hysteria, Freud gives up hypnosis for concentration and the pressure of his hand, and binds the patient to report every image or idea that comes, without selection and uninfluenced by criticism or affect. In the case of Emmy von N. he records her asking him to stop asking where things came from and let her tell what she had to say.
In Studies on Hysteria (1895)
1905
developed by Sigmund Freud
In the preface to the Dora case, Freud writes that his technique has been transformed since the Studies: instead of tracing the symptoms one by one, he lets the patient choose the subject of each session and starts from whatever the unconscious presents on the surface. He reads hidden connections from the order in which the patient's ideas follow one another.
In Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905)
1912
developed by Sigmund Freud
Ties the failure of free association to the transference: whenever the patient's associations stop, the stoppage can be removed by telling him that he is in the grip of an idea about the physician. A patient caught in transference resistance feels free to neglect the fundamental rule.
In The Dynamics of Transference (1912)
1924
reworked by Sándor Ferenczi
With Rank, Ferenczi rejects analyses that collect associations and translate them one by one, as if they were the substance of the work. Associations only show where, and how deep, the operative affects lie. An analyst who merely lets the patient associate and interprets each association reduces the analysis to an association experiment.
In The Development of Psychoanalysis (1924)
1924
reworked by Otto Rank
With Ferenczi, Rank rejects analyses that collect associations and translate them one by one, as if they were the substance of the work. Associations only show where, and how deep, the operative affects lie. An analyst who merely lets the patient associate and interprets each association reduces the analysis to an association experiment.
In The Development of Psychoanalysis (1924)
Relations
introduced by
- 1895 Sigmund Freud
In his chapter on the psychotherapy of hysteria, Freud gives up hypnosis for concentration and the pressure of his hand, and binds the patient to report every image or idea that comes, without selection and uninfluenced by criticism or affect. In the case of Emmy von N. he records her asking him to stop asking where things came from and let her tell what she had to say.
developed by
- 1905 Sigmund Freud
In the preface to the Dora case, Freud writes that his technique has been transformed since the Studies: instead of tracing the symptoms one by one, he lets the patient choose the subject of each session and starts from whatever the unconscious presents on the surface. He reads hidden connections from the order in which the patient's ideas follow one another.
- 1912 Sigmund Freud
Ties the failure of free association to the transference: whenever the patient's associations stop, the stoppage can be removed by telling him that he is in the grip of an idea about the physician. A patient caught in transference resistance feels free to neglect the fundamental rule.
gave rise to
- 1912 Fundamental rule
The fundamental rule states the method of free association as the obligation the patient accepts: to say everything that comes to mind, without criticism. Ferenczi and Rank speak of the technical 'fundamental rule' of free association.
reworked by
- 1924 Sándor Ferenczi
With Rank, Ferenczi rejects analyses that collect associations and translate them one by one, as if they were the substance of the work. Associations only show where, and how deep, the operative affects lie. An analyst who merely lets the patient associate and interprets each association reduces the analysis to an association experiment.
- 1924 Otto Rank
With Ferenczi, Rank rejects analyses that collect associations and translate them one by one, as if they were the substance of the work. Associations only show where, and how deep, the operative affects lie. An analyst who merely lets the patient associate and interprets each association reduces the analysis to an association experiment.
diverges from
- Cathartic method
Free association grew out of Breuer's cathartic method and departed from it. Finding that many patients could not be hypnotised, Freud set out to reach the pathogenic memories without hypnosis, then gave up other means of suggestion too, and let patients associate freely.
Works
- 1895
- 1905
Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
Freud's case history of "Dora", an eighteen-year-old Viennese woman (later identified as Ida Bauer) whom he treated for about eleven weeks at the end of 1900; written in 1901, it appeared in 1905 in the Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie. Dora suffered from a nervous cough, loss of voice, shortness of breath and low moods, and her father brought her to Freud after her parents found a letter in which she hinted at suicide. Behind the symptoms Freud uncovers a family entanglement: her father's affair with Frau K., and the advances of Frau K.'s husband, Herr K., whom Dora slapped after a proposal by a lake and whose earlier kiss had filled her with disgust. Freud reads her symptoms as the expression of repressed sexual wishes — love for Herr K., a revived childhood attachment to her father and, at the deepest layer, love for Frau K. — and builds the case around the interpretation of two dreams: a burning house from which her father rescues her while her mother wants to save her jewel case, and a wandering through a strange town after her father's death. Dora broke off the treatment on 31 December. In the Postscript Freud attributes the failure to his not having recognised and interpreted in time the transference of her feelings for Herr K. onto himself, and gives his first sustained account of transference as a new edition of old impulses directed at the physician.
- 1924
The Development of Psychoanalysis
Entwicklungsziele der Psychoanalyse (1924; in English, The Development of Psychoanalysis, 1925) is a short programmatic book by Sándor Ferenczi and Otto Rank, issued as the first number of Freud's series Neue Arbeiten zur ärztlichen Psychoanalyse. According to its preface, it grew out of conversations in the summer of 1922: Ferenczi drafted the critical part and Rank the positive section on the analytic situation. The two revised the whole together after Freud, at the Berlin congress of September 1922, set a prize question on how analytic technique and theory had influenced each other. They adapted the text to that question but withdrew from the competition. The book argues that psychoanalysis had grown from a therapeutic procedure into a vast body of theory while its technique lagged behind, leaving many analysts disoriented and too closely bound to Freud's few technical papers. Starting from Freud's "Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through" (1914) and the repetition compulsion of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the authors give repetition, rather than remembering, the leading role in treatment: the decisive unconscious material was never conscious, so it can only be reproduced in the relation to the analyst, where it must be understood and turned into present memory. Rank's section describes analysis as a time-limited process of libidinal flow, set going and carried by transference. The analyst stays largely passive and intervenes, like a catalyst, where resistance marks a neurotic deviation. Ego resistances give way to a transference in which the clinical neurosis is converted into a transference neurosis that revives the Oedipal "primal neurosis". Frustration keeps affects from discharging prematurely and drives the libido back to its points of fixation. A final phase of "weaning" dissolves the transference, and for it the analyst sets a fixed end date. Abreaction remains the healing agent, but its affects now run their course in the relation to the analyst rather than being tied to recovered memories. Ferenczi's historical-critical section reviews techniques that had stalled at earlier stages of psychoanalytic knowledge: collecting associations, dictionary-like translation of symbols, symptom analysis, "complex analysis", mechanically uncovering the stages of libido theory, speculative, phylogenetic and anagogic interpretation, lecturing patients, calling every stall a resistance, and both rigid passivity and "wild activity". It names the analyst's own narcissism as a source of error, and holds that the unconscious proper, never experienced, can only be relived piecemeal in the present, as a "fractionated catharsis". A chapter on theory and practice distinguishes intellectual knowledge from conviction gained through experience, and presents Freud's work as a "circulus benignus" in which each corrects the other. The authors see psychoanalysis moving from a phase of knowledge (Erkenntnisphase) to a phase of experience (Erlebnisphase). They conclude that a training analysis should not differ from a therapeutic one, that the patient's excess of knowledge should give way to the analyst's greater knowledge, and that technique will grow simpler, perhaps even readmitting hypnosis and suggestion, while psychoanalytic knowledge becomes common to all physicians and to therapists who are not physicians. Published in the same year as Rank's The Trauma of Birth, the book became a point of contention within Freud's inner circle.
See also
References
- Studies on Hysteria1895Evidence for a relation
- Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria1905Evidence for a relation
- The Dynamics of Transference1912Evidence for a relation
- The Development of Psychoanalysis1924Evidence for a relation