A practitioner's notes on the free-associative method as existential praxis

Freud's pre-1914 texts demonstrate why he consistently asserted that his free-associative method was the sine qua non of his discipline. Prior to 1914, Freud's theorizing was intimately and inextricably connected to his lived experience with the discovery of this method. After 1914, he became more speculative in this thinking and writing; his models of the “mental apparatus” and its functioning drew increasingly on conceptual sources other than his experience with free association. The four fundamental coordinates of his discipline (the methodical disclosure that self-consciousness is repressive, the nonlinear “time of the mind,” the significance of our sensual embodiment or libidinality, and the formation of the repression barrier by the incest taboo) are all closely tied to free-associative experience. By contrast, post-1914 theoretical preoccupations (from object relations to the structural-functional model, and other formulations generated after Freud's life) are comparatively divorced from such experience. These conceptual edifices imply a conventional depiction of the theory–practice relationship, which is radically challenged by free-associative discourse. The notion of praxis is introduced as contesting the prevailing depiction of practice as an application of theory, and as serving to rescue psychoanalysis from the somewhat “sterile debates” over its scientific status and over the relevance of metapsychological speculation to clinical treatment. Against the normative ideology of theory and practice, the lived experience of free-associative discourse, with its potential for change and healing, can only be understood in terms of this notion of praxis, and this justifies Freud's claim to have initiated “a critical new direction in science.”     

Free-associating with the bodymind

Abstract

The history of attitudes toward Freud's adoption of free-associative discourse, as well as toward the significance of the clinical significance of the free-associative method, is critically reviewed. It is argued that, if one takes the re-inviting of repressed contents back into self-consciousness to be the defining process of psychoanalysis as a discipline (distinguishing it even from those psychotherapies that are based on psychoanalytic models of the mind), then free-associating is indeed the sine qua non of the psychoanalysis process. It is further suggested that whereas Freud's notion of libidinality radically subverts Cartesian dualism, our thinking about the significance of free-associative discourse has too frequently lapsed into the mistaken assumption that free-associating should only be about what “comes to mind.” In this context, a way of free-associating with the “bodymind” is described as an addendum to customary psychoanalytic practices. This augmented method remains faithful to Freud's practice of allowing the voice of sensuality to “join the conversation,” at the same time that its clinical implementation incorporates some of the wisdom concerning “breathwork” that comes from the yogic procedures for cultivating awareness.