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It has become obvious that the discipline of research in psychoanalysis has undergone a significant metamorphosis in the last two decades. From the classical dictum “every clinical case is a research case,” psychoanalysis is now partnering with a number of disciplines and has provided us with some productive cooperation that is meant to further validate our field for the present and future. I will not repeat the major contribution of NCP to “Research Psychoanalysis” and its research candidates here. More recently, a closer partnership with experimental psychology and neuroscience has become significant. It was then no major surprise when Dr. Charles Fisher, research chair of the APsaA program, invited Bart Blinder and me to present a discussion group based on our recent publication: Free Association in Psychoanalysis and its Link to Neuroscience Contributions.

In our paper, we first reviewed the literature on free association, which has old roots in Greek philosophy and mystical experience as well as the School of British Associationists. However, it was Galton, in 1879, who influenced Freud. In his study in Vienna, Sigmund Freud, in turn, was inspired by Frau von N, who insisted that he say nothing and listen to her while she was freely expressing rather unconnected thoughts. Fast forward 120 years…In our Institute, Richard Tuch has been a strong proponent for the maintenance of free association as the ground rule of psychoanalysis, a position that goes against some of those in American psychoanalysis that thought to “retire the concept.” It was this long lineage of literature and a previous APsaA workshop presented with neurologist, Mark Fisher, that inspired us to review the neuroscience literature. Free Association is, in fact, what I would call a “basal” mental state. Such “basal mental states” have been discovered by cognitive sciences and referred to as “spontaneous thought” that occurs in an unrestricted manner when we are not thinking of anything in particular. Such unrestrained thoughts occur, when for instance, we lie down and let our mind freely wander. Neuroimaging has shown that during such states, only the central part of the brain remains active (referred to as the “Default Mode”), similar to a heartbeat of the mind that allows for consciousness to continue and be ready to be activated by volitional thoughts. Spontaneous thoughts appear in different variants, including “mind wandering” (meandering), creative word association, different forms of meditation, and altered states of mind induced by hallucinogens. However, these variants already involve different degrees of volitional cognition which tends to originate in the Executive Frontal Cortex. Free association is, in fact, an interplay between spontaneous thoughts and some executive function. I will comment about the generative power of this interaction below.

Immediately, we set up a panel for APsaA: I reached out to my supervisor, Rich Tuch, who has been a major contributor to the field; we invited Henry Zwi Lothane, a polyglot psychoanalyst (who analyzes in five languages), supervising and training analyst at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, who is also a historian of psychoanalysis. Off we went to Boston, and we convened on June 2, 2022. Dr. Fisher chaired the meeting. First, Bart Blinder presented a brief but comprehensive summary of the findings of our free association paper. In his powerful metaphoric language, he described free association as “Lifting the Cloak of Restraint,” with regard to repression, repetition, restriction, rigidity. He also presented the basic thesis of our paper; namely, that free association is on a continuum with mind wandering, stream of consciousness, and meditation as part of adaptive mechanisms of rewiring of the brain and mind in creating novelty and transformation. I followed with my presentation of a video that I created in which the dynamic mechanisms in brain and mind in free association and meditation were portrayed. My interest in the future of free association research is the relationship to the unrepresented primal repressed and the achievement of a state of synchrony between analyst and analysand. Is synchrony, perhaps, another evolutionary sanctioned mechanism of “basal mental state?” –Perhaps references to empathy, or in a different context, Bion’s state of O?

The last two power plays of our discussion group followed: Dr. Richard Tuch changed the tenor of the meeting by presenting a masterfully crafted paper based on his previous work. Rich Tuch is one of the American psychoanalysts, along with Kris, Rosegrant, Lothane and others, who have maintained that free association has curative effects per se beyond its information gathering that leads to an interpretation. In his characteristic manner, Rich presented the case of a young man whose free association created an emotional moment in an intersubjective context, in which analyst and analysand were experiencing similar feelings. Finally, Dr. Henry Lothane presented a historical view, with the undertow of disputes, over the years, between different leaders in our field and his international take on free association.

I would add here that the shifting back and forth between spontaneously generated thoughts and the structure created by the analytic setting has a particular deconstructive and reconstructive effect on the mind. It may also follow the laws of Complex Dynamic Systems (see Galatzer-Levy, 2004), which govern self-organizing systems influenced by environment. This work is based on mathematical contributions by Rene Thom’s Catastrophe Theory and places free association, the ground rule of psychoanalysis, into the realm of a fundamental mental activity meant to readjust and repair the human mind.

In conclusion, during the June APsaA meeting, NCP has emerged as a strong contributor to new directions in research of psychoanalysis.

Dr. Novac is a second-year candidate at NCP.

APsaA Discussion Group 26:

Andrei Novac
Barton Blinder
Richard Tuch
Henry Zvi Lothane
Charles Fisher

Additional resources:

Free association in psychoanalysis and its links to neuroscience contributions

Shifting between Alternative Modes of Cognition: Can Free Association, in and of Itself, Prove Therapeutic?

Free Association as the Foundation of the Psychoanalytic Method and Psychoanalysis as a Historical Science

Below: Modified by Novac and Blinder from original by Cristoff et al 2018