ABSTRACT
Free speech functions as a democratic symbol more than as an achievable reality, as both lived experience and the fitful evolutions of First Amendment jurisprudence have revealed. Sigmund Freud's fundamental rule bequeathed to psychoanalysis a paradoxical rule, and the odyssey of free association became a tale of the paradox of freedom. The practice of psychoanalysis forfeited the "panoramic memory of the hypnotised subject" for free association and its moral imperative, becoming as much a study of freedom as a study of resistances. There is an irony at the core of both the First Amendment and psychoanalysis's fundamental rule: Both imply that freedom is the rule, that constraint is the exception. To draft a bill acceptable to Federalists and Antifederalists alike, the framers chose to bypass specific points of controversy, wording their amendment by invoking only general principles.
