Free Association, Surprise, Trauma, and Transference

ABSTRACT

I contend that free association, far from being outdated, is a most central feature of the method of psychoanalysis, as it operates an essential reopening of the process of translation/repression. Free association sinks its roots in a Helmholtzian model of the mind and is, therefore, also congruent with modern neuroscience. Through the notion of surprise, logical and practical connections can be established between free association, seduction, trauma, and transference. A well-conceived concept of free association is, therefore, an indispensable tool for the practice of psychoanalysis.

Notes

¹ Creativity as resulting from psychoanalysis was famously addressed by Winnicott, but I cannot deal with it here.

² The notions of bound versus free energy is present in Breuer’s and Freud’s theoretical chapters in Studies on Hysteria (1895), although they use them in rather different ways. Breuer uses free energy to mean potential energy; bound energy is the one doing some actual work. In Freud, free energy points to the free displacement of investment between representations. So Breuer’s reasoned in Newtonian mechanical terms, whereas Freud thought, psychologically, of the disruptive nature of unbound energy.

³ In an article that came to my attention while I was finishing writing the present, Barnaby B. Barratt (2017) insists on a similar idea, also expounding other arguments in favor of free association that I largely subscribe to.

⁴ A forthcoming English version of book by the French psychoanalyst Laurence Kahn is, in my view, a mandatory reading in this regard. Its original title could translate as: The Apathetic Analyst and the Postmodern Patient (Kahn, 2014).

⁵ The ego and its translations, however, are only unconscious in the descriptive, but not in the systemic, sense.

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Dominique Scarfone

Dominique Scarfone, M.D., is honorary professor, Université de Montréal; and training and supervising analyst, Canadian Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, French Montreal branches.