ABSTRACT
Free association begins at the site of an intense drama, seeking both reunion with that drama and freedom from it, a claiming of personal creative destiny from predetermined fate. While a conception of the mutuality of free association is apt to raise questions of its validity, psychoanalysis recognizes the analyst's asymmetrical responsibility to the patient's expressive freedom. To set the stage for Sigmund Freud's discovery of the transference, the chapter looks at his advice to the analyst on how to cultivate the patient's free associations. Freud had developed a non-directed free association technique, approximating aspects of the dreaming state. He was soon referring to this—and its implicit moral injunction—as "the fundamental rule". Freud was especially influenced by Breuer's work with a patient, Bertha Pappenheim, who dubbed this self-narrating process "chimney sweeping" and who coined the definitional term "talking cure."
