ABSTRACT
The setting (or frame) and the statement of the fundamental rule put the patient in an unusual situation in which only the use of words is permitted. This prohibition repeats metaphorically the taboo on incest and the fundamental rule requires the patient to transfer his entire psychical production onto speech. He is required to say freely everything that comes to his mind. He will transfer from the outset—that is, he will express via language—an earlier affective and libidinal conflict, which infiltrates and impregnates the present and the actual content of his discourse. Language is the medium, then, for expressing wishes for instinctual satisfactions, for elucidation, for renewal and change, all of which are opposed by the compulsion to repeat.
