Free Association

Freud's initial formulations viewed psychoanalysis as working towards the rediscovery of psychic elements - thoughts, feelings, memories, wishes, etc. - that were once known - represented in the mind, articulatable, thinkable - but then disguised and/or barred from consciousness. His subsequent revisions implicated a second, more extensive category of inchoate forces that either lost or never attained psychic representation and, although motivationally active, were not fixed in meaning, symbolically embodied, attached to associational chains, etc. Following Freud's theory of representation, the author conceptualizes these latter forces as "unrepresented" or "weakly represented" mental states that make a demand upon the mind for work and require transformation into something that is represented in the psyche, if they are to be thought about or used to think with. This paper describes, discusses and presents illustrations of this transformational process (f...

Trauma yang dialami seorang individu seringkali memberikan permasalahan baru bagi penderita mulai dari kurangnya kemampuan sosialisasi, gangguan psikologis, hingga penurunan kemampuan akademis. Terutama bagi remaja yang dalam proses peralihan ke dewasa dengan berbagai permasalahan trauma hingga trust issue. Penanganan trauma masa lalu secara optimal dibutuhkan untuk mencegah penderita mengalami kesulitan dan permasalahan dalam kehidupan sehari-harinya. Penelitian ini hadir untuk mengkaji mengenai penanganan trauma masa lalu melaui penggunaan teknik asosiasi bebas berlandaskan pada teori psikoanalisa Sigmund Freud. Teknik yang dikemukakan Sigmund Freud terdiri dari asosiasi bebas, intepretasi mimpi, analisis traferensi, dan analisis resistensi. Untuk mengetahui penyebab trauma seorang individu, maka seorang konselor melakukan teknik asosiasi bebas. Teknik asosiasi bebas merupakan teknik pokok dalam psikoanalisa yang dilakukan melalui pengarahan bagi konseli untuk bisa berpikir jernih dan fokus pada pemikiran sehari-hari. Teknik asosiasi bebas berusaha untuk mengungkapkan trauma sekaligus melepaskan emosi traumatis yang terjadi pada masa lalu. Teknik asosiasi bebas ini mampu menjadi teknik dalam mencapai penanganan emosi trauma seorang individu secara optimal.

This essay explores the mostly unexamined analogy of psychoanalytic free association to democratic free speech. The author turns back to a time when free speech was a matter of considerable discussion: the classical period of the Athenian constitution and its experiment with parrhesia. Ordinarily translated into English as " free speech, " parrhesia is startlingly relevant to psychoanalysis. The Athenian stage—in particular, Hip-polytus (Euripides, 5th century BCE)—illustrates this point. Euripides's tragic tale anticipates Freud's inquiries, exploring the fundamental link between free speech and female embodiment. The author suggests that psychoanalysis should claim its own conception of a polis as a mediated and ethical space between private and public spheres, between body and mind, and between speaking and listening communities.

This research is aimed to know whether using of free association technique and play therapy in group counseling can help to solve the problem of students VIII E SMP N 1 Wates Kulon Progo. The tool of data collections are used observation, group counseling, task giving, questionnaire. Meanwhile, the way to solve counselee problem is group counseling with free association technique and play therapy. The technique of this research used qualitative approach that includes data collection, data reduction, presentation of data, triangulation and conclusion. The results of the research showed that free association technique can help the students to reveal a problem easier. The implementation of play therapy was done before, during and after the group counseling. The type of play therapy used such as: making a tower, domikado, series of name, a cat to give chasing a mouse, a police to give chasing thieves etc.

This paper explores a marginal type of beliefs (e.g. not recognized by social institutions such as science and religion), namely beliefs about the potential effects of full moon on life events, and particularly on human behaviour. Interviews, word associations, a questionnaire and an experiment were conducted in the area of social representation of the full moon. The main phenomena observed were the presence of organizing principles in participants’ discourses (i.e. symbolic oppositions between science and folk beliefs, men and women, "fools" and "sane" people, "primitive" and "civilized" persons, etc.) and the expression of hypothesis confirmation.

Num mundo em constante mutação, novas tendências e novas explorações surgem. Nos anos 60, nos Estados Unidos, uma revolução iniciava-se: o panorama da dança e da performance modificavam-se e os paradigmas, inerentes aos mesmos, quebravam-se. O corpo enquanto corpo presente, a dança enquanto um conjunto de movimentos banais, expressos por um corpo do qual o público não consegue fugir. A norma clássica cai: o pós-modernismo, nos anos 60, quebrou com as convenções daquilo que poderia ou não ser considerado dança ou performance. Yvonne Rainer, cineasta, coreógrafa e bailarina, fez parte do Judson Dance Group, nos anos 60, e marcou-se, nessa altura, enquanto uma das mais influentes coreógrafas e bailarinas do pós-modernismo-ou anti-modernismo-do universo da dança. Trio A e Terrain são alguns dos exemplos das peças mais influentes do seu trabalho, e que questionam, no seu cerne, a forma como a dança é representada, a forma como o corpo é representado, tal como o papel disruptivo e transgressivo da performance. Ainda que esta seja a perspectiva actual, a realidade é que a opinião de grande parte dos críticos da época não era favorável em relação às performances de Rainer. As suas criações, no entanto, não tinham por objectivo agradar ao público, nem induzir uma relação de affect com o público. O público, neste caso, era predominantemente composto por indivíduos do mundo da dança, ou das artes em geral. Qual será o real efeito de tal tipo de performance num público não inserido no mundo das artes, ou até mesmo num público especializado? Neste ensaio, o foco é colocado no trabalho de Yvonne Rainer, no seu papel no panorama da dança e da performance, e, igualmente, na análise da recepção, por parte do público, de algo que quebra com as convenções e com as expectativas.

It has not been fully appreciated that psychoanalysis, in its origins, was both a talking and a writing cure. When Freud instructed his patients to say whatever came to mind, using words to verbalize that which was preconscious replaced the hypnotic technique as the "talking cure" and was the beginning of the psychoanalytic method. Freud used writing to an internal other in his self-analysis, and his free association writing has had an enormous influence on psychoanalysis. This author has introduced writing into the treatment of some patients and has found it invaluable with psychosomatic patients, including those who suffer from eating disorders and self-injury, because they tend to use their bodies rather than words to express emotions. Today's "widening scope" evokes a need to develop newer techniques, especially with patients who are unusually resistant to free associating or whose thinking is presymbolic. Caution must be taken that writing eases the resistance to free association and does not serve as a source of resistance itself, and that it serves creative rather than destructive aims. A little-known event in psychoanalytic history is instructive: E. Pickworth Farrow, a former psychoanalytic patient, devised a self-analytic process through writing down his free associations.

This short commentary outlines psychoanalysis as a theory and method and its potential value to media research. Following Dahlgren, it is suggested that psychoanalysis may enrich the field because it may offer a complex theory of the human subject, as well as methodological means of doing justice to the richness, ambivalence and contradictions
of human experience in relation to media. The psychoanalytic technique of free association and how it has been adapted in social research is suggested as a means to open up subjective modes of expression and thinking – in researchers and research participants alike – that lie beyond rationality and conscious agency.

Psychodynamic conflicts form an important construct to understand the genesis and maintenance of mental disorders. Conflict-related themes should therefore provoke strong reactions on the behavioral, physiological, and neural level. We confronted N = 18 healthy subjects with a vast array of sentences describing typical psychodynamic conflict themes in the fMRI scanner and let them associate spontaneously in reaction. The overt associations were then analyzed according to psychoanalytic theory and the system of operationalized psychodynamic diagnosis and used as a genuinely psychodynamic indicator, whether each potentially conflict-related sentence actually touched a conflict theme of the individual. Behavioral, physiological, and neural reactions were compared between those subjects with an "apparent conflict" and those with "absent conflicts." The first group reported stronger agreement with the conflict-related sentences, more negative valence in reaction, had ...

Conservative constitutional jurisprudence in the United States has an important libertarian dimension. In recent years, a conservative majority of the Supreme Court has strengthened the constitutional protections for property rights, recognized an individual right to own firearms, imposed limits on the welfare state and the powers of the federal government, cut back on affirmative action, and held that closely held corporations have a right to religious liberty that permits them to deny contraceptive coverage to their female employees. This libertarian streak can also be seen in decisions on freedom of speech and association. In several leading cases, conservative judges have used the First Amendment in a libertarian manner to invalidate regulations that reflected liberal or progressive values. For example, these judges have rejected efforts to limit the role of money in election campaigns, struck down restrictions on hate speech and pornography, expanded protection for religious sp...

The Covid crisis has scholars thinking of how political relations and bonds will be transformed by this pandemic. By analysing current events in Spain, this article aims to analyse how, and why, the Schmittian political relation of friend-enemy and warfare narrative work as the discursive framework of this pandemic. This article proposes a feminist turn to antagonisms to articulate an alternative response to this crisis. Through a Lacanian reading of symptoms and facemasks, the article presents facemasks and symptoms as two crucial elements to analyse antagonism and locate the threat in current political relations. Lastly, the article introduces the facemask paradigm in which non-neutral limits work by positioning the threat inside the signifying chain and not outside of it, entailing a subversion of the classical Schmittian antagonism that implies a new political relationship based on corresponsability.

Draft of catalog contribution for the exhibition "Nandi" at the Condo Association, Chicago, September 2017, curated by Dominique Knowles.

Curatorial statement: The show concerns Kamadhenu, the sacred cow in Hinduism who shall not shed blood, but be sustained with milk; the brutality of The Eucharist; the sexuality of Christ giving birth to his humanity; Madonna and Child revealing Christ’s mortality; vulnerability in Noli me Tangere; St. Sebastian’s homoeroticism; animality in Greek mythology; the autonomy of the queer body; a capacity for transformation and a devotion to an expanding language of embodiment. Perhaps what is at stake is a loss of empathy. Especially since there are pluralities, complexities and elasticities regarding various bodies.

Participating artists:
Parker Bright
Elijah Burgher
James Kerley
Rohan Khanna
Michael Madrigali
Anwar Mahdi
Ignacio María Manrique
Kaveri Raina
Pfeiffer + Walz
Caleb Yono

Lawmakers must care more to educate children than to cater to their parents.  While parents and the state both have roles in childhood development, the difficulty is finding the proper balance. Lawmakers must decide who should determine exposure of children to new and different ideas. Arguments that limit exposure to ideas should be pursued with the good of a child as the desired end, and not the means to some other end. These arguments fall into two categories: negative arguments and affirmative arguments. Affirmative arguments are less likely to be made with ulterior motives in mind. In the spirit of legal perfectionism, lawmakers have the obligation to make laws for the good of children, and these laws must keep the proper balance between the responsibilities of parents and the state.

Applying the model of Ian Shapiro, a political scientist, the state is responsible for a child’s basic interests and the parent is responsible for the child’s best interests. Basic interests can be viewed as those interests attributable to all children, rather than best interests, which can be seen as unique to the individual child. The state is obliged to provide children with a quality education, where they can be exposed to new ideas and values. This is a basic interest for all children and will allow for success in the adult world. Parents do not have the right to keep children in intellectual slavery. A parent cannot, for example, keep a child from knowledge of evolutionary biology or the germ theory of disease, because of the parents’ hope for the child’s future religious preference that would contradict the child’s basic interest. Instead, parents should expose children to various new and different perspectives, even if they feel it is in the best interest of the child to rebut these views.

Freud discovered how dreams provide a royal road into the un-conscious, revealing man's good and evil, and how the mundane, base metals of dream life can be transformed into precious metals of an enriched inner world. He distinguished manifest from la-tent contents, using free ...

Past studies of strategic thinking have shown that the encoding of the message information becomes more complex under distrust. Receivers process the information as if they are trying to protect themselves from being misled by testing alternative potential interpretations. The present study investigates the possibility that when people are mistrustful they spontaneously activate associations that are incongruent with the given

In this interview Chris Vanderwees speaks with Moe Robinson, a psychiatrist and emeritus training and supervising psychoanalyst of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society & Institute. Beginning with the topic of free association, the conversation revolves around Robinson's emphasis on Lacanian technique including presence, patience, listening, and special attention to the letter and the signifier.

Dans cet entretien Chris Vanderwees parle avec Moe Robinson, un psychiatre et psychanalyste didacticien émérite de la Société Psychanalytique de Toronto (Toronto Psychoanalytic Society & Institute). Commençant parle sujet de l’association libre, la conversation se déroule autour de l’emphase que Robinson porte sur la technique lacanienne comprenant la notion de présence, patience, l’écoute ainsi qu’une attention spéciale portée sue la lettre et le signifiant.

Younger and older adults solved reasoning problems in either abstract or meaningful form. Contrary to expectation, older adults did not differ on the two versions, but younger adults were aided by meaningfulness. Results of a second task showed no age differences in the time to produce associations to problem elements or in the number of associations. There were differences in the quality of associations, and association quality was significantly related to performance on the reasoning problems for older adults.

Lawmakers must care more to educate children than to cater to their parents. While parents and the state both have roles in childhood development, the difficulty is finding the proper balance. Lawmakers must decide who should determine exposure of children to new and different ideas. Arguments that limit exposure to ideas should be pursued with the good of a child as the desired end, and not the means to some other end. These arguments fall into two categories: negative arguments and affirmative arguments. Affirmative arguments are less likely to be made with ulterior motives in mind. In the spirit of legal perfectionism, lawmakers have the obligation to make laws for the good of children, and these laws must keep the proper balance between the responsibilities of parents and the state. Applying the model of Ian Shapiro, a political scientist, the state is responsible for a child’s basic interests and the parent is responsible for the child’s best interests. Basic interests can be v...

Psychoanalysis is commonly considered a procedure for investigating the mind, a treatment method, and a general theory of mind. This article suggests that psychoanalysis can also satisfy criteria for another, less conventional, framing. Engaging with analysts’ accounts, I demonstrate that psychoanalysis is a practice that deals with the most profound questions of life, creates shifts in the way reality is perceived, and even enables unconditional love to arise in the hearts of its practitioners. It can thus be deemed a mode of spiritual practice. Thanks to the recent ‘spiritual turn’ in society, the spirituality inherent in psychoanalysis is now being acknowledged more openly. Yet the argument here is that psychoanalysis was always spiritual in essence, and it is only that today we are able to recognize this.

Despite having been broadly advertised by the mass media, many negative consequences of the Zika virus have been less significant than originally predicted. It is likely that after a few months from the epidemic's onset, personal experience with the virus has altered the person's way to deal with the disease. This study explores the relation between exposure to Zika virus and the social representation of the epidemic. More specifically, one analyzes if increased exposure to the risk of Zika infection changes the characteristics of the web of meanings surrounding the epidemic. Between August and November of 2016, 150 interviews were conducted in the municipality of Governador Valadares, Minas Gerais State, Brazil. Based on the Free Words Association Technique, data on evocations related to the Zika virus were modeled by social network analysis, allowing the characterization of the web of meanings by level of exposure to the risk of Zika infection. The analysis performed here ...

This study was conducted to explore the representations of India amongst families of military personnel. The Social Representations Theory (SRT) was specifically chosen for this study because of its ability to delve into the ideas, beliefs and values that make up representations of any phenomena among social groups. Data was collected from 40 family members of Indian Armed forces personnel which included spouse, parents, siblings and adult children. A free association task was given and was then thematically analysed. Results revealed that the participants representations were spread across three broad themes which have been discussed below.

The clerical estate (soslovie) of late Imperial Russia was legally segregated from the rest of the population, subject to separate systems of education, justice, taxation, and access to employment. The state permitted participation in free associations within the clerical soslovie in order to encourage the practice of mutual aid among clergymen and their families. By the late nineteenth century, the parish clergy had begun to use these mutual-aid associations to provide education, charity, and disaster relief to the non-clerical communities on which they and their families depended for tithes. By using their own mutual-aid networks as tools of pastoral work, the parish clergy expanded those networks, in terms of both beneficiaries and participants, beyond the limits of the clerical soslovie. Key reforms of the diocesan structure in 1905 both loosened central control over the clerical networks and authorized the direct participation of non-clergy in their work. The associations of the parish clergy thus obtained unprecedented independence and social integration at the moment when they were confronted with the humanitarian disaster of 1905. Focusing on the dioceses of Moscow and Tver, this article examines the parish clergy’s use of their own soslovie networks to provide famine relief to fellow clerics and the general population between 1905 and 1909. This famine relief campaign demonstrated the independence and initiative of voluntary associations in late Imperial Russia. It also revealed the potential for cooperation and social integration among seemingly disparate communities, even within the divisive framework of the soslovie system.