**3. Free-associative method divulges the 'Psychology of Repression'**

Even after 1915 (and even though this assertion contradicted the increasingly objectivistic framing of his later theorizing), Freud would repeatedly insist that the *sine qua non* of his discipline is the method of free-associative speaking on the part of the patient and listening on the part of both patient and psychoanalyst [9]. Most of his successors have taken this less than seriously. They reduce free-association merely to a particular technique of 'data-gathering' for the purposes of formulating the patient's functioning in accordance with one or another objectivistic model. Alternatively, seeing the technique merely as clinically valuable in opening channels of communication by which the patient and the psychoanalyst interact, in terms of reciprocating fantasies that have a preconscious or descriptively unconscious status—communications that provide material for the latter's interpretations, which are the instigator of change in the patient. In these frames, psychoanalysis is cast as a primarily epistemological operation (producing information that can then be used instrumentally to change the patient's psychic functioning). This standpoint overlooks the possibility that free-associative discourse itself catalyzes changes in the being-becoming of the individual participants—the possibility that psychoanalysis is primarily an 'ontoethical' venture.

For heuristic purposes, it can be argued that there are twin poles to (or modes of) the processes of free-association. At the more conservative pole, it is a matter of speaking aloud with absolute confidentiality, which enables the subject to say whatever would not ordinarily be spoken in public. In this mode, the individual enunciates chains of stories, each of which more or less 'makes sense,' and the sequentiality of the chaining discloses underlying themes that must have been preoccupying the speaker (presumably without reflective consciousness of the themes that are being expressed).

For example, I talk about my neighbor who is currently suing me in court, claiming she owns a piece of my property. Next, I talk about how I can often smell her unpleasant cooking wafting into my garden. Then I mention a lover with whom I would never stay overnight, because she thrashed about in bed, leaving me no space to sleep. Suddenly I start to recall a childhood incident in which my mother lied to a family friend, claiming that it was I who had told her a falsehood, which I had not. Clearly, whether I realize it or not, there is a theme here concerning my anxiety, rage or fear, of being invaded or overtaken by a female force. It is probably not a theme that would have surfaced like this if I had not been allowing censorship to relax—for example, if I had just been sitting with a therapist trying to 'figure out' the reasons for my feelings.

If a person talks freely whatever 'comes to mind' without the usual level of interpersonal censorship, then one narrative rolls into the next and themes or sub-themes emerge that are not conveyed adequately by any single narrative, but that gain weight as one listens to their sequencing. This has value in terms of a therapist's ability to help patients 'make sense' of their lived-experiences in ways that are novel (and may often be adaptive). However, it can be argued that this is not yet psycho-*analysis*, where the 'analytic' process is not the philosopher's logical analysis-in-order-to-make-sense (an epistemological labor), but rather the chemist's task of unsettling the stability of a compound in order for its elements to be free to rearrange themselves (an ontological or ontoethical treatment).

A radicalized method of free-association requires the patient to relinquish any mandate to 'make sense' and to speak aloud the stream of consciousness (while lying comfortably and keeping the eyes closed). The patient is enjoined to express the stream of consciousness, rather than to attend to narration. At this pole, the process defies description in writing—in Freud's words it 'tolerates no audience and cannot be demonstrated'—because what is expressed becomes quite different from the uncensored sequencing of stories, or indeed anything that appears to make sense. Indeed, what is radical is precisely the speaker's capacity to disengage the narratological imperative and give voice to all that is within (or, at least, as much as is feasible, since consciousness moves faster than can be given utterance).

This radicalized method of free-association is wild. The emphasis of the process now shifts to the aliveness of the 'saying' rather than to the interpretation of what is 'said.' With such a radical praxis, vocalization becomes more chaotic, and momentary bodily sensations are more likely to be voiced, as the stream of consciousness meanders, babbles, and crescendos in fits and starts. The speaker's utterances are invariably more linguistically disorganized and, in an important sense, more energetically, poetically and erotically embodied, as well as more regressive. There are hiccups and hallucinations, meaningful gaps in meaning, syncopations, the voicing of bodily events, and so forth. In this way, the usefulness of free-association not so much as a tool (deployed in order to know), but as an opening of the patient's being-becoming, an unsettling momentum toward greater authenticity [6–8].

What did Freud believe he had learned from his earliest experiments with freeassociation? His masterwork of 1900, *The Interpretation of Dreams*, elaborates a depiction of psychic life, as illustrated by the deconstruction of dreamwork [10]. The manifest content of a dream is generated, by operations of condensation and displacement, from 'latent dream thoughts' that have been *suppressed* from consciousness. The motor of transformational operations, which take meaning from latent thoughts and express it disguisedly in manifest contents, is energetic. Freud also postulates that psychic life always has an 'unfathomable navel'—an energetic wellspring of

*Rediscovering the Psychoanalytic Revolution: Contemporary Crisis as the Result of Resisted… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110157*

meaningfulness not itself translatable into representational meaning, and thus *repressed* from consciousness [10–12].

Freud thus distinguishes his discipline from all other psychological frameworks as the 'psychology of repression', and he criticizes any endeavor that begins by giving credence to the productions of reflective consciousness—that is, any discipline that does not interrogate or deconstruction these productions for what they render unthinkable [13–15]. Concurrent with the discovery of repression came the realization that what the child realizes is most unthinkable are incestuous impulses, which have to be repressed. Repression is thus always associated with oedipality, and the dynamics of suppression and repression are typically active around conflictual matters of sexuality—in this sense, the energies of the unconscious are always erotic or libidinal [10, 15–16].

In three papers published in 1915, Freud systematizes this depiction [17–19]. These are an effort to summarize what he believed he had discovered in the course of nearly two decades of experience with free-association. There are several ways to read these complex papers. One schematic and nonconventional way is as follows. There is an arena of psychic life that is within the purview of representational reflection. This is one definition of consciousness (called 'secondary consciousness by some scholars). Then, there are representations that have been cast into exile by what I am calling the operations of suppression. They are persistent, as if indefinitely—but not inactively. Rather, they are impactfully insistent in getting their meaningfulness expressed disguisedly in consciousness, indirectly influencing the contents of its purview (in a camouflage generated by the operations of condensation and displacement). Then, there are representations of thoughts, feelings or wishes, so threatening that they are subjected to repression*.* It is as if they cross what Freud called the 'repressionbarrier,' losing their representational form but retaining their meaningfulness as traces of psychic energy—in its genesis, this barrier may be understood as the intrapsychic inscription of the incest taboo. This is a deformation of representation into a meaningful—and embodied—energy trace. Such traces join the energetic source of meaningfulness that Freud in 1900 called the navel of psychic life and 'the core of our being.' This energizes the dynamics between what is representationally expressed and suppressed. These then are the findings—formulated by Freud as 'helpful notions' rather than disprovable hypotheses—that one arrives at through lived-experience with the method of free-association.
