ABSTRACT
Introducing the importance of associativity in psychoanalytic listening cannot be conceived without a deep reflection on what concerns associativity in Freud’s thought and the pathologies of narcissism. The three representatives of the impulse in Freud, the only ones through which we can know it, the representation by word, the representation with thing, the representative-affect, are three forms of language: the verbal language, the symbolic language of dreams or act, the language of affects. Associativity in human expression is polymorphic, it mixes these three forms of language, and its listening must be polyphonic. In this chapter, I note the traces of these forms of language in Freud’s work and the way in which he listens to them in order to open the question of the analyst’s necessary polyphonic listening, especially with regard to the communication of “primitive experiences” so essential in listening to narcissistic suffering. I also study how verbal language is also a language of the body, how speech is also corporeal and thus carries messages from bodily experiences as well as being present in it. With the help of an analysis fragment, I explain a way of hearing and working on the presence of early traces in the analysis session.
