Free association and changing models of mind.

The method of free association, like most major psychoanalytic concepts, was developed in and has been conceptually tied to a one-person, intrapsychic, drive psychology. Psychoanalysts who have retained the classical, drive-structure metapsychology have continued to emphasize the free association method, while those who have shifted to a relational, two-person, interactional or interpersonal point of view have often minimized or abandoned the free association method. This article explores this unfortunate dichotomy and examines the ways in which the free association method, stripped of its unnecessary tie to drive theory and reconceptualized within the context of a two-person psychology, remains a valuable clinical method. Free association, as a method, can be useful to psychoanalysts of all theoretical orientations as a reminder of Freud's most important discoveries, that is, of unconscious mental life, psychic determinism, psychic continuity, and meaning, as well as of the value and priority of careful, restrained, and disciplined listening to patients and of taking our lead from them. The method of free association, with the corresponding assumption of the analyst's evenly hovering attention, provides a fundamental context within which our personalities and theoretical biases, instead of being disruptions or impositions, become active and analyzable aspects of the analytic process.