ABSTRACT
When Sigmund Freud invented the psychoanalytical process—the basic method of the free associating analysand and what Adam Phillips so astutely terms the free listening analyst —he fulfilled a search. Psychoanalytical movements usually form around a charismatic figure and they become cults that use the words and ideas of that figure to bind their community together. In this way, psychoanalytical movements counteract the creative evolution of psychoanalysis. Remembering Freud’s remarkable statement—the “analyst catches the patient’s unconscious with his own unconscious”—stresses the work of unconscious thinking. Ingeniously, Freud asks for associations, which are somewhere between maternal and paternal orders of thought, between the dreamy world of life within the maternal ambience and the lucid world of the paternal laws and socialization. Freud had at least three significant models of the mind: the dream work model; the topographic model; the structural model.
