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 following a rule to “say whatever comes to mind,” and by paying money to do so, analysis does not happen without the analysand offering something of themselves. Yet the analysand is simultaneously offered a freedom from the usual ways of speaking in an ego-to-ego relation, as well as a freedom to hear and act on unconscious desire. Once the subject begins to speak, further limits on freedom become evident, as they find it difficult to say whatever comes to mind, and (later) discover that speech itself is limited.

This is because free-association, as means of analysis, reveals itself paradoxically to be an act of impossibility and one that logically must come to an end. Its impossibility and its end are both located in speech as signifying function, generating a horror of knowledge that meaning cannot ultimately be deciphered and that no object can ultimately satisfy desire. 

Free-association is not merely a technique, but a paradoxical concept that is at the heart of psychoanalysis. For already by being laid down as a fundamental rule of the treatment and the quintessential demand of the analyst, the analysand is limited in their freedom. One could even call the fundamental rule the a priori interpretation of the analyst: an enigmatic one, because of its capacity to leave the question “what is my analyst’s desire of me?” undetermined. “He wants me to speak, but what does he want me to say?” The desire of the analyst, beyond this demand for speech, is an emptiness that will be the motor-force of associations to come.

What is repeated in the analytic setting is what constitutes the subject’s origin: the Other’s demand that they speak, that they say what they want, that they make a demand of their own. This summons to being through speech is what subjectifies the analysand. The demand that the subject speak is not free, however. Language is not free – it is the very debt that inhabits us. This is why the analysand pays for their sessions, and why analysis is never free of charge, for the payment registers the debt of life. As Nestor Braunstein puts it: 

In fact, the clinic shows the devastating effects on those for whom existence is free, the ones who do not stumble with a demanding Other in a system of mutual equivalency, who receive before asking, outside a system of exchange, when the anticipated satisfaction of the demand crushes the very possibility of desire.^[2]

The one demand made by the analyst (that the analysand say whatever comes to mind) leaves them free to speak in a way that they are unlikely to have experienced elsewhere. Nowhere else can a speaking being find such solace away from the many demands of ego-to-ego relations that put the subject in the place of an object. Here, under transference, they can say whatever they want, and in fact they often say more than they want – through displacement or metaphor.

Already, by making this demand, the analyst has turned the tables on the analysand’s demand for a gift of knowledge. The analysand thus has the opportunity to abstain from the place of object, and this includes the place of cogito, the supposedly free-thinking self-reflective ego. Free-association quickly dismantles any notion that the subject is the master of their speech. Rather, it is the signifier that is the master of the subject. This creates not only conflict within the analysands themselves, but also often with the analyst and the treatment. This conflict, manifest in what Freud calls ”resistance,” is enhanced over time when the analysand begins to encounter how they repeat in both speech and act. As Freud says in “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through,”^[3] the patient repeats associations, perhaps complaining about the same things over and over, or recounting stories where they are in the same position again and again. Furthermore, they will repeat instead of remembering, perhaps acting out in the transference both within and outside the consulting room.

Earlier on in the interview with Wolff, Lacan is asked about the role of the analyst. He responds that the role is “I didn’t make you say it.” What is this “it” that the analyst does not say? It is what Lacan calls, in “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power,” a “free word.” He puts it this way: 

The subject invited to speak in analysis does not show in what he says, to tell the truth, a great deal of freedom. It is not that he is chained by the rigor of his associations: they undoubtedly oppress him, but it is rather that they lead to a free word, a full word that would be painful for him. Nothing is more frightening than to say something that could be true. Because it could become completely true, if it were, and God knows what happens when something, because it is true, can no longer enter into doubt.^[4]  

It is through analysis that the subject manages to speak this “free word” beyond the knowledge of the Other, occupying an irreversibly new position of satisfaction and desire. Analysis invites an encounter, not just between analysand and analyst, but with this “free word.” It is precisely in service of this “free word” that the analyst must refuse the position of the speaking subject. This is not to say that the analyst does not speak, but in analytic discourse this freedom of the analyst is bound to the ethics of whatever will promote a free word being spoken. What this word is no one can know ahead of time, but it is important that it be a word that stands apart, singularly. 

In his response to Andre Albert’s presentation in 1975 at the École freudienne de Paris “On Pleasure and the Fundamental Rule,” Lacan outlines what is at the heart of free-association: “What is targeted in setting out the fundamental rule is the thing about which any subject is the least inclined to speak, namely – let’s say, because I want to articulate things well here – his symptom, his particularity.”^[5] By coming to speak his symptom, the analysand is able to say the free word that is singular.

“You know that free association, we could come back to the question, is precisely not possible. Nevertheless the fact is that this method is free association.”^[6]

Why is free-association not possible? Why invite the analysand into such an impossibility? The impossibility lies on two accounts: first, the limit of the signifier, second, the limit of the analytic discourse.

When the subject speaks in analysis, the first limit they encounter is a fundamental rule of the signifier itself, which is that it always represents the subject for another signifier. The very nature of the signifier itself is such that its non-identity with itself makes analysis possible in the first place.^[7] There is no movement or metonymy without the gap between signifiers, the emptiness where the subject is.  This is why certain signifiers will repeat in treatment, linking and determining the subject. This is the bet of psychoanalysis, that these signifiers will manifest themselves on the surface of speech (rather than the depths of meaning or intention) through repetition. Whether a word, phrase, or phoneme, this signifier will repeat in a way that can be heard (possibly even by the analysand!).

The act of interpretation marks another limit of free-association: that of the analytic discourse. In this discourse the subject speaks without knowing it, and the analyst listens with this savoir that he has acquired in his own analysis. The analyst operates precisely through not knowing, but there is something that the psychoanalyst does know – and his desire as a psychoanalyst is based on this knowledge: he knows that the analysand knows without knowing that he knows. 

The rule of free association, Lacan states, “enables us to track what happens in the unconscious,”^[8]for through it, the analysand’s discourse suspends the law of non-contradiction and “opens up the subject to this fertile mistake through which genuine speech joins up once again with the discourse of error.”^[9]

Furthermore, free association is a discourse which, unbeknownst to the analysand, is directed toward their unconscious fantasy, as Moustapha Safouan indicated: “Contrary to appearances, the discourse made up of free associations does not go in any direction; it progresses, on the contrary, towards the revelation of the pathogenic nucleus, in other words towards the revelation of fantasy.”^[10]

It is precisely through encountering and working with this fantasy that one can find a savoir within it, a freedom within one’s singular determination. For one is never free from discourse.

Bibliography

Braunstein, Nestor. Jouissance: A Lacanian Concept. Trans. Silvia Rosman. Albany, NY: 2020.

Freud, Sigmund, “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1958.

Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. Trans. Bruce Fink (New York, NY: WW Norton, 2007), 596.

— “Interview de Lacan par Françoise Wolff au lendemain de la conférence de Louvain.” Trans by Anthony Chadwick. 10/14/1972. https://freud2lacan.b-cdn.net/Lacan_on_Belgian_Radio-final.pdf

— “On Pleasure and the Fundamental Rule.” Trans. Adrian Price. The Lacanian Review 11, no. 2, 2021.

— Seminar 1: Freud’s Papers on Technique. Trans. John Forrester. New York, NY: WW Norton, 1991.

— Seminar 5: Formations of the Unconscious. Trans. Russell Grigg. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2017.

— Seminar 12: Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis, 1/27/1965. Translated by Cormac Gallagher. http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wpcontent/uploads/2010/06/12-Crucial-problems-for-psychoanalysis.pdf

— Seminar 13: The Object of Psychoanalysis, 12/22/65. Translated by Cormac Gallagher. http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/13-The-Object-of-Psychoanalysis1.pdf

Safouan, Moustapha. Le Transfert et le desir de l’analyst, trans by Deepl.com. Paris, France: Seuil, 1988.

Endnotes

^[1] Lacan, Jacques, “Interview de Lacan par Françoise Wolff au lendemain de la conférence de Louvain,” trans by Anthony Chadwick. 10/14/1972. https://freud2lacan.b-cdn.net/Lacan_on_Belgian_Radio-final.pdf

^[2] Braunstein, Nestor, Jouissance: A Lacanian Concept, trans. Silvia Rosman (Albany, NY: 2020), 64.

^[3] Freud, Sigmund, “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through,” The Standard

Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), 147-56.

^[4] Lacan, Jacques, Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York, NY: WW Norton, 2007), 596.

^[5] Lacan, Jacques,“On Pleasure and the Fundamental Rule.” The Lacanian Review 11, no. 2 (2021): 19-20.    

^[6] Lacan, Jacques, Seminar 12: Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis, 1/27/1965. Translated by Cormac Gallagher. http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wpcontent/uploads/2010/06/12-Crucial-problems-for-psychoanalysis.pdf

^[7] Lacan, Jacques, Seminar 13: The Object of Psychoanalysis, 12/22/65. Translated by Cormac Gallagher. http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/13-The-Object-of-Psychoanalysis1.pdf

^[8] Lacan, Jacques, Seminar 5: Formations of the Unconscious, trans. Russell Grigg (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2017), 32.

^[9] Lacan, Jacques, Seminar 1: Freud’s Papers on Technique, trans. John Forrester (New York, NY: WW Norton, 1991), 282-83.

^[10] Safouan, Moustapha, Le Transfert et le desir de l’analyst, trans by Deepl.com (Paris, France: Seuil, 1988), 123.

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 with the analyst sitting behind them. But none of this really has anything to do with psychoanalysis. Indeed, there is very little attention given to the theory or practice of psychoanalysis, especially in the clinical field.

A cursory glance at the history of psychoanalysis will tell you that psychoanalysis can mean different things to different people. The existence of various psychoanalytic schools over the last century is quite reminiscent of the Protestant Reformation, with each school/theorist claiming loyalty to or distancing Freud. For our purposes, we will stick with Freud’s own thoughts on the subject of defining what psychoanalysis is.

Freud gives the following advice to psychoanalysts who are asked this question in the New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis in 1932. He wrote:

“If you are so imprudent as to betray the fact that you know something about the subject, they fall upon you with one accord, ask for information and explanations…. You may perhaps expect an introduction to psychoanalysis to give you instructions, too, on what arguments you should use to correct these obvious errors about analysis, what books you should recommend to give more accurate information, or even what examples you should bring up in the discussion from your reading or experience in order to alter the company’s attitude. I must beg you to do none of this. It would be useless. The best plan would be for you to conceal your superior knowledge altogether. If that is no longer possible, limit yourself to saying that, so far as you can make out, psychoanalysis is a special branch of knowledge, very hard to understand and to form an opinion on, which is concerned with very serious things, so that a few jokes will not bring one to close quarters with it – and that it would be better to find some other plaything for social entertainment” (SE XXII, 136-137).

Given this rather terse response from Freud, perhaps we should refrain from the question altogether. As a clinician, I admit I have found it best to say as little as possible about what psychoanalysis is, because knowing what it is ahead of time does no one much good in the practice of it. Yet there is one thing that I do say, and it governs the framework of the treatment: “Say whatever comes to mind.” This imperative, which sounds far more simple than it actually is, invites the patient to speak freely, to engage in what Freud called “free-association.” Why is this not simple? Because one begins to recognize that there is a censor acting upon one’s speech, cleaning it up, making sure no mistakes are made, and that no surprises happen. Of course, in life as in speech, surprises do happen, and hearing ourselves anew can elicit new ways of being in the world.

What does the psychoanalyst want from the patient? Speech. Anyone who has experienced psychoanalysis will testify that they began to hear connections in their histories that were not there before, things that repeated without their knowing it. In short order, psychoanalysis reveals that we were “spoken,” often through the words used by our parents and caretakers. And these words from the Other are not without psychic and bodily effects, as they inhabit our own self-representations.

Perhaps this is why psychoanalysis is a notoriously difficult undertaking in the United States (“land of the free and home of the brave”) is because it invites us to encounter just how determined by the Other we have been, and that we were not as free or brave as we imagined ourselves to be. Psychoanalysis, in other words, is not about boosting/strengthening the ego. It invites us to a new freedom and bravery in speaking that we have not known until now. It is a path to self-knowledge, but not without a questioning of the self that is doing the knowing. Thus, psychoanalysis is a wager on life that requires letting go of the self that already thinks it knows.