ABSTRACT
(I) In accepting to present one of the texts designed to open the discussions of the IPA Congress in 2001, my intention was to return to a subject that I had already explored, namely, the crucial articulation between the fundamental rule and the analytic situation. The fundamental rule is an extension of the original procedure for investigating the unconscious: free association. The analytic situation arose from more or less contingent conditions, but ones on which it came to confer the value of a structural ensemble that is necessary for initiating the project of analysis.
