ABSTRACT
Although Freud stated the 'fundamental rule' of psychoanalysis as that of free association - that the patient should speak whatever comes to mind, without selection or censorship - the rule of analysis is in fact even simpler than that. In reality, all that is required for analysis to take place is that the patient and the analyst should be in the room together. The patient might speak, but also might not; it is of little concern, as silences are treated in the same way as words. Nothing is what it seems, everything is open to interpretation on the part of the analyst, whose task is to listen and attempt to gain access to whatever is being communicated from below the surface of the patient's discourse. And the patient cannot fail to communicate, even if all this communication consists of is the proffering of a cut-off, non-communicating state.
