ABSTRACT

Readers will have ideas about Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and his method of “the talking cure.” You may know that the clinical practice of psychoanalysis involves a psychoanalyst’s meeting with an analysand, or patient, many times each week with the only request to “just speak” about anything. For this, there is no preparation. The technique of “free association,” indeed, the idea of free speech and of being able to say what is on one’s mind, however, presents an obstacle to the analysand. Freud learned

that free association is affected with estranging thoughts: speaking them carries on the mind’s capacity to associate things in the world with a history of anticipations and beliefs for them and calls upon the emotional fact of transference, that the wandering mind drifts through long ago relations and fixates, obsesses, and forgets them.