Chris Nelson

How Analysis Begins: The Preliminary Interviews When Freud wrote “On Beginning the Treatment” in 1913, he described his practice of taking on patients “at first provisionally, for a period of one or two weeks,” which he called a “preliminary experiment” or “trial period.” His stated reason was pragmatic: “If one breaks off within this period […]

During his interview with Françoise Wolff, when asked, “Doesn’t psychoanalysis contain a repression of freedom?” Lacan responded with a chuckle, saying, “Those words make me laugh. I never talk about freedom.”[1]   This tongue-in-cheek remark raises the question of the equivocal nature of this word “free” in Freud’s fundamental rule of “free association.” For already by

The term “psychoanalysis” recalls certain images in the popular imagination, despite its rather unpopular situation in the United States today. Almost everyone has heard of Freud, either in a psychology class or through more colloquial turns of phrase like the “Freudian slip.” Many cartoons depict therapy or counseling with the patient lying on the couch