Int J Psychoanal (2017) 98:3953 doi: 10.1111/1745-8315.

12563

Opening to the otherwise: The discipline of listening

and the necessity of free-association for
psychoanalytic praxis1

Barnaby B. Barratt
Senior Research Associate, Wits Institute for Social and Economic
Research, University of Witwatersrand; Training Analyst, South African
Psychoanalytic Association; The Heritage Stone House, 122 Virginia Ave-
nue, Parkmore, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa BBBarratt@Earth-
link.net

(Accepted for publication 12 April 2016)

It is argued that only free-association methodically opens the discourse of

self-consciousness (the representations available to reflective awareness) to
the voicing of the repressed. The method is key to Freuds originality and the
sine qua non of any genuinely psychoanalytic process. Clinical procedures
which do not prioritize a steadfast and ongoing commitment to this method
(instead emphasizing either interpretative formulations, as decisive acts that
appear to fix and finalize the meaning of a particular lived experience, or the
vicissitudes of transference-countertransference in the immediate treatment
situation) all too readily entrap the treatment, limiting its capacity to divulge
the power of unconscious processes. Influenced by Laplanche, Freuds 1920
principles of lifefulness and deathfulness (the binding and unbinding of psy-
chic energy in representations) facilitate an understanding of the unique sig-
nificance of free-associative discourse in opening the representational
textuality of self-consciousness to the voicing of that which is otherwise than
representationality and reason. The otherwise is intimated as the returning
force of the repressed, as the unfathomable navel of thing-presentations,
experienced and expressed within the text of awareness, yet not translatable
into the law and order of its logical and rhetorical reflections. Free-associative
discourse thus affects self-consciousness in a way that is radically different
from other creative procedures (psychosynthetic or integratively interpre-
tive). In this respect, the status of free-associative praxis as necessary for a
genuinely psychoanalytic process is justified.

Keywords: repressed, free-association, other texts, otherwise meaningfulness, uncon-

scious, psychosynthetic methods

Even after the shift in his writing that occurred around 1914, Freud contin-
ued to assert consistently that the method of free-association is the sine qua
non of his discipline (191617, 1924, 1925, 1937). Yet the contemporary
world of psychoanalysis is quite divided as to the significance of this mode
of discourse. On the one hand, commentators such as Kris (1996), Bollas
(2002, 2008), Green (e.g., 2000, 2002, 2005), and Torsti-Hagman (2003)
1
An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the 49th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical
Association, Boston, July 2015.

Copyright 2016 Institute of Psychoanalysis

40 B. B. Barratt

assert its importance, indeed necessity, for a genuinely psychoanalytic pro-

cess (a notion which in itself may be quite controversial). On the other
hand, luminaries such as Fonagy by repute (see Hoffer and Youngren,
2004) and a legion of other eminent commentators (e.g., Hoffman, 2006)
seem to propose that such discourse is not necessary for the practice of our
discipline, even if it is optionally useful. Their position is that free-associa-
tion can be replaced by other procedures of data gathering or interper-
sonal dialogue, and that the resulting discourse will still remain
psychoanalytic. In this paper, I argue that this position is seriously mis-
taken. However, if the defenders of Freuds claim concerning the necessity
of free-association are correct as I believe they are then further discus-
sion is warranted as to why this is the case. Despite the interest of recent
empirical investigation into the neurophysiological concomitants of free-
association (e.g., Spence et al., 2009), it is very unlikely that this issue can
be resolved by the evidence of positivist or objectivistic experimentation.
However, a critical inquiry into the properties of different modes of dis-
course might illuminate the crucial significance of the why question. This
paper contributes to such an inquiry.

What is repressed?
Freud was adamant that he had discovered a psychology of repression
(1901) and that the repressiveness of self-consciousness is the cornerstone
on which the whole structure of psychoanalysis rests (1914). It is clearly
Freuds opinion that this dynamic is the cardinal coordinate of the entire
scientific venture. Many contemporary practitioners would disagree with
this bold assertion, claiming that psychoanalysis has advanced beyond
Freuds discovery; for better or worse, the discipline has diversified. In this
paper, I suggest that the claim of advancement may be presumptuous and
Freuds assertion must be taken seriously; that is, the cardinal coordinate of
his discipline is this discovery (for that is what Freud insists it is) of the
repressiveness of self-consciousness (by which I mean the textual domain of
representational reflective awareness). It is possible to take repression as a
center, Freud adds in 1918, and bring all the elements of psychoanalytic
theory into relation with it. We might add that the dynamic of repression
is not a convincing notion unless one surrenders to free-associative praxis,
and that this method would be virtually irrelevant were it not for the repres-
siveness of self-consciousness.
Starting in the late 1890s, Freud found that this method discloses how
the functioning of self-consciousness renders some ideas or wishes unknown
or unknowable to itself (eigentliche Verdr angung, literal or so-called sec-
ondary repression). Following this disclosure, Freud later speculated that
some such dynamic (which, in 1915a, he names Urverdr angung or primal
repression) must be structurally implicated in the very origins of psychic
life. That is, such a dynamic must have a formative role in the originary dif-
ferentiation of representationality from the energies or drive forces (Triebe)
that animate it and that are related to, but not identical with, biological
mechanisms. As has been discussed, notably by Laplanche (199293, 2000

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 Listening to the otherwise 41

2006), the controversial notion of Urverdr angung (which might better have
been called something like disavowal, Verleugnung) pivots both on a distinc-
tion between psychic energy (Triebe) and biological mechanisms (called
Instinkte by Freud), and on the way the former lean on (anlehnung which
the Strachey volumes misleadingly translate as anaclisis) or follow from
the latter. In this paper, space does not permit a critical review of the debate
around the necessity of this distinction between representations and the
energy invested in them. Rather, I am going to assume the value of a theory
of Trieb as nonidentical either with the representations that it animates or
with the neurobiological phenomena from which we presume it to be derived
(cf, Barratt, 2015, 2016; Green, 1973, 1995; Laplanche, 1993, 20002006). I
make this assumption in part because it sharpens the crucial question: What is
the status of the repressed in the everyday processes of repression (that is, as
what sort of a meaningful entity, archive or trace, does it insistently persist)?
I must quickly make it clear that, in raising this question, I am not at least
primarily and directly addressing the issues of empty universes, where there
may have been a complete failure of presentation or representation. My con-
cern diverges, at least in the limitations of this paper, from that of recent writ-
ers who focus on the treatment of patients who are said to suffer from voids
in their experience that have to be addressed by techniques of clinical inter-
vention that go beyond those that have been classically described (e.g., Bion,
1970; Botella and Botella, 2005; Green, 1993; Levine et al., 2013; Rousssillon,
1999; Winnicott, 1971). Rather, my triple purpose is to challenge the assump-
tion that cure requires the sufficiency of representational insights or assimi-
lated interpretations, to (re)assert the special significance of erotically
embodied thing presentations in human functioning, and to suggest that
free-association permits these to be listened to, despite the fact that they
remain largely or insufficiently translatable into representational form.
As a starting-point, I invite consideration of Greens comment, in his
1999 interview with Kohon. He noted that . . . in the preconscious you
have words and thoughts, but in the unconscious you are not supposed to
have words and thoughts, you only have thing-presentations. This is some-
thing that for us is very important . . . (p. 46). The implication of this
standpoint is threefold.
The first point is critical. If an idea or wish, once it has been repressed, no
longer has the representational form that ideas and wishes have when we are
aware of them (or when they are archived such that we might potentially
become aware of them), then much of what is called the unconscious
much of that which is usefully brought to the surface in clinical discourse
and deemed to have been unconscious is actually not equivalent to the
unconscious qua repressed. To give just one example of how this opposes
rationalistic trends in contemporary theorizing, it challenges Levines asser-
tion that there is an organized, articulable subset of the unconscious that
we call the repressed, which he then contrasts with the perhaps infinite,
formless, not yet organized and not yet articulated or articulable subset of
pre- or proto-psychic elements that we might call the unstructured or
unformulated unconscious (2012, pp. 606607). The assumption here is
that, if the repressed impacts preconscious and conscious psychic life, which
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42 B. B. Barratt

of course it does, it must be potentially articulable by interpretation. It is

this sort of supposition that sees psychoanalytic cure as more a matter of
interpretive understanding than of facilitating the capacity to listen to forces
that impact us, but that are otherwise than that which can be rendered into
a text. Herein, I intend to challenge this supposition.
This same challenge is implied, but tactfully unelaborated, in Greens 1974
critique of Isaacs classic paper on unconscious phantasy (a critique that
has not, to my knowledge, been answered in the Kleinian literature). Such an
operative phantasy, which can be therapeutically unearthed and articulated
by judicious inference from the sequence of manifest contents or through dili-
gent tracking of the transference and countertransference, is a formation that
is, or can be, represented. Sooner or later, it is knowable and can be interpre-
tively articulated within the representational domain of self-consciousness.
Thus, in Greens terms, its operation cannot have been unconscious. Rather, I
suggest, it should be theorized as having been deeply preconscious. Much of
what occurs in clinical discourse involves bringing into self-conscious or
reflective awareness these operative fantasies/phantasies that have been pre-
conscious at some level. That is, constellations of ideas and wishes that were
shadowy yet might be considered gradations in the clarity of consciousness
(Deutlichkeitsskala der Bewusstheit), resulting from processes of suppression
(Unterdr uckung), condemnation (Verurteilung) or the detours of deflected
attentionality (Aufmerksamkeit). Thus they can be therapeutically elucidated,
precisely because they involve meaningfulness that is representable even if it
had been initially inaccessible to reflection. Such meaningfulness must be con-
sidered preconscious, even if deeply so. In this respect, the term unconscious
has become so licentiously employed in our literature that it is almost scientifi-
cally useless. If ideas and wishes that were initially inaccessible can be thera-
peutically unearthed and representationally articulated in self-consciousness,
whether by means of countertransferential experience (e.g., Jaffe, 1997; Pick,
1985) or observational inference (e.g., Boesky, 2002; Ramzy and Shevrin,
1976), then they were preconscious, even if deeply so, and they are not equiva-
lent to that which is repressed. If Green is correct, as I believe, then the
repressed unconscious, by definition, includes modes of meaningfulness that
elude or exceed any representational formulation.
Thus the second point, entailed by Greens position but typically avoided
in the current psychoanalytic literature, is the extent to which the repressed
unconscious necessarily remains unknown (that is, unrepresentable), pre-
cisely because it involves impulses that are ontologically different from the
meaningfulness of representationally. Of course, we use the term thing-
presentation to include images and affects that can be, at least approximately
(but only approximately) translated into the languages of representation, but
it is also clear that the term includes impulses that are not translatable in this
way (and never will be, which does not imply that they cannot be listened to).
The implication is that whereas one might become able to listen to the voic-
ing of the repressed, through the praxis of free-association, it is not to be
assumed that the meaningfulness of the repressed is entirely translatable into
the languages of representation. Using a distinction derived from Bion, it can
be said that repressed impulses can be experienced as disruptions in the
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 Listening to the otherwise 43

cogency, coherence and consistency, of self-consciousness, but known about

or represented only very approximately (or, so to speak, at some temporal
and semiotic distance), because such impulses elude, exceed, or contradict the
logical and rhetorical law and order of representationality. As is well known,
Freud labored to make this crucial point, describing the persistent force of a
certain sort of desirousness, the absence of not and the timelessness charac-
terizing repressed traces that are in the unconscious he discovered. The ines-
capable implication of this is that the unconscious is never mastered and
that, as studiously we may try to capture it by the reasoning abilities pro-
vided by representationality, its liveliness always exceeds and eludes such
translation. In short, whereas self-consciousness and its preconscious sub-
strata involve systems of represented ideas and wishes, what is split off from
or repressed by these systems evades adequate or sufficient translation into
their domain. This is surely why, from his earliest writings on free-associa-
tion, Freud was unequivocal in his opinion that the repressed unconscious is
not a matter of gradations in the clarity of consciousness and, he insisted,
that between the systems of conscious or preconscious psychic life and the
repressed, there is a barrier (Schranke) that keeps them asunder (Freud,
1905, 1912, 1915a, 1915b). In contemporary terminology, we would perhaps
prefer the notion of a chasm or chiasmus to that of a barrier to describe the
hiatus between moments of meaningfulness that can be represented, such as
the archives of memory, and the meaningfulness of traces that defy interpre-
tation (cf, Barratt, 1993, 2013b, 2016; Derrida, 1972, 1975, 1995, 1996).
The third point is that, if the repressed entails a different sort of meaning-
fulness from representationality (and indeed one that is not translatable into
the languages of representation), then any assessment of a method of
inquiry and/or healing (such as free-association, active imagination, inter-
pretive insights, or modifications in the transference) must consider the nat-
ure of the repressed unconscious and the way it evades translatability. That
is, it must address the repressed not as a text other than that of immediate
self-consciousness; not as if it were a subtext that is translatable into the
representationality of self-consciousness. Rather, the repressed must be
understood as the lived experience of a meaningfulness that intrudes disrup-
tively upon conscious or preconscious texts, the domain of representational-
ity. The repressed is to be listened to as meaningfulness otherwise than
representation; meaningfulness that eludes, exceeds, or contradicts the
domain of translatability. It can be listened to, even while it remains essen-
tially untranslatable; even if we make strenuous efforts to render it in a logi-
cal and rhetorical form that it actively defies.
In the remainder of this paper, I will first consider further this notion of
an otherwise meaningfulness and then advance the claim that, unlike any
psychosynthetic method, free-associative praxis comprises the only viable
means by which to listen to such meaningfulness.

Other texts and that which is otherwise than textuality

If the manifest text is that which is evident in the here-and-now and imme-
diately appropriable by the reflectivity of self-consciousness (whether this is

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44 B. B. Barratt

a reported dream, a scholarly exposition or a quotidian remark), there are

always many other texts that might be operative behind, beneath or beyond
its apparent meaning. To give a rudimentary example, if I say to my col-
league there is a delicious-looking apple on your desk, it is possible that I
am merely stating a fact, because the fruit looks remarkable (but why
would I bother to state it?). It is also very possible that I am telling him
that I am hungry and want him to share it. It is, as every psychoanalyst is
aware, additionally possible that I am expressing my acquisitive greed, jeal-
ousy or envy (I want his apple, even though I am not currently hungry),
that I am trying to draw my colleague into greater connection or intimacy
(we can both admire the apple in a shared experience), that I am attempt-
ing to seduce him with the serpentine wiles of Eve (show me what else you
have that might be delicious), and that, of course, the apple symbolizes not
just an item by which to satiate nutritional hunger, but erotic pleasure, sex-
ual intention, or even knowledge. Obviously, there are undoubtedly several
more possibilities, which we need not enumerate. These are all what I am
calling other texts, the domain of meanings that are representable and pre-
conscious, more superficially or more deeply so.
How can we ascertain whether they are actually operative in the mind
as I utter the initial remark? This is the long-standing question whether an
interpretation proffered by a clinician attentive to my utterance is plausible
or even correct. In this respect, free-association is just one procedure by
which the operation of these other texts may be unearthed. Imagine a clini-
cians request, please speak whatever comes to mind as you consider the
remark you made to your colleague. We might objectively infer, from the
verbalized sequence of thoughts and feelings that follows this request, which
other texts were likely operative at the time I commented on the apple.
Alternatively or additionally, we might use whatever we know about my
relationship with my colleague to adjudicate between possible other texts
(like a dialogical inference on the basis of transference) and we might use
whatever my colleague tells us about his sense of our relationship in order
to render such an adjudication (like a dialogical inference on the basis of
the countertransference). But free-association is far from the only means
by which one might arrive at such interpretive conclusions. Similar infer-
ences could be made from a variety of data sources; for example, analyz-
ing my Rorschach or Thematic Apperception Test responses, examining an
account of my life history, or asking me to do any number of creative exer-
cises. After all, preconscious meanings are, in some sense, archived as latent
contents and thus the archive must be potentially accessible by a variety of
procedures.
However, the meaningfulness of the repressed is altogether different
(diff
erant). Even when the repressed returns, overflowing, interfering and
scarring the logical and rhetorical law and order of the conscious and pre-
conscious domain, it does so in disguises that testify to its untranslatability.
To articulate this in the manner I have discussed in previous publications,
self-consciousness only reveals the repressed as it simultaneously conceals it
(Barratt, 1993). Here we must take seriously several of Freuds speculative
or mythematic ideas that are a necessary means by which to comprehend
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the distinctiveness of his discoveries specifically, his notions about psychic

energy, unfathomable navels and thing-presentations. As an aside, I am
fully aware that the term is used for imagistic and proto-affective traces that
are translatable, at least to some degree, into representational form, but I
am focused here on the embodied somatic traces that speak to us meaning-
fully in a language that remains unknown the voicing of our libidinal
embodiment. None of these matters can be demonstrated or proven; a fact
which will dissatisfy the skeptic, and which has given our discipline a hun-
dred years of trouble from philosopher-critics, the latest and most tren-
chantly vociferous of whom is perhaps Gr unbaum (e.g., 1993). Yet even if
not demonstrable or provable, the otherwise meaningfulness of the
repressed can, as all of us who have been patients in a genuinely psychoana-
lytic process should know, be experienced known experientially, but never
really known about in Bions terms. This is surely why Freud was con-
vinced that the discourse of which psychoanalytic treatment consists
brooks no audience and cannot be demonstrated (191617, p. 10). Previ-
ously, I have presented examples of free-associative material in an effort,
not to demonstrate the undemonstratable, but merely to indicate how, in
the passage and process of free-associative discourse, there are eruptions of
meaningfulness beyond those meanings furnished by other texts indeed,
untranslatable into the representationality of such texts (Barratt, 1991,
1993, 2013b).
Freud (1900, p. 115) wrote that every dream has a passage (eine Stelle)
that evades the most comprehensive of interpretive labors, and that has to
be left obscure (muss man oft eine Stelle im Dunkel lassen), a tangle (Kn auel)
or knot, which cannot be unraveled (der sich nicht entwirren will). Here we
might legitimately substitute cannot be unraveled for cannot be trans-
lated (cf. Derrida, 1996). This is the dreams navel (der Nabel des Traums),
where its textuality reaches down into the unknown that is actively a source
of our being, yet cannot be translated into representable thoughts and
wishes. Why would we possibly believe that this unfathomable navel is
only operative in the textuality of the oneiric, even if it is more stridently
intimated in dreams (thus giving their meaningfulness the privileged status
of via regia)?
In passing, it must be noted here how many commentators, such as Bol-
las, have described the process of free-association as dream-like, a reverie,
which is, I believe, a profoundly important insight. Also to be noted, before
I encounter an objection, let me quickly acknowledge that there frequently
are subjects who appear to be associating, but are not; patients and practi-
tioners who engage in a kind of faux association that is actually quite
tightly structured by the narratological imperative. I have discussed such
resistances to free-association elsewhere, and will not go further herein (Bar-
ratt, 2013b, 2016).
What must be brought into focus here is the consideration of this navel
as the trace of a meaningfulness that is embodied, even if not archivally rep-
resentable (and is what Derridas 1996 essay calls the omphalos of the text).
That is, this unfathomable navel points to the brio of lived experiences,
their presencing/absencing. Like our physical belly button, this textual
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46 B. B. Barratt

navel points to erotic connections that are essential to, yet can never be
appropriated by, the subject. Like the belly button, this navel continues to
speak to us, even if seemingly mute, in a strange and untranslatable mean-
ingfulness, that comes from the mysteries of our own erotic embodiment. It
presents and absents itself as the sourcing of every humanly expressed or
enunciated text (note that one does not anticipate finding any such navel in
computer talk). Of particular significance is the way in which free-associa-
tion opens awareness to the enigmatic signification of the body. Vigorously
pursued (and avoiding the resistance of faux association), the process allows
the subject to become more aware of the voicing of our erotic embodiment;
I have discussed this in more detail in a recent publication (Barratt, 2013a,
2014). The navel of psychic life thus hints at the enigmatic moments in
which pure energy connects, as if arbitrarily, with the realm of signifiers or
representations (cf, Lacan, 1953, 195354, 195455, 1964). Such a sourcing
is perhaps less obscured in dream-life than in the everyday narratives by
which we make sense. Yet (and this is crucial) it is to the insistence and
persistence of the rhythms of this navel that free-association opens us.
Fifteen years after writing the Traumdeutung, Freud articulated what is, I
believe, the same issue in terms of his notion of thing-presentations. In my
reading, three points may be garnered from these 1915 essays. First, repres-
sion (at least in its eigentliche mode) is understood as a deconstituting or
decomposing. What might have been formed as representations, or word-
representations, is now repressed into the status of a thing-presentation.
Lived experience that is repressed is rendered, not as an archive, but as a
trace, like a pulse of psychic energy. Second, such repressed traces persist
and persistently insist on trying to find expression in consciousness and pre-
consciousness. They thus remain embodied indeed, erotically embodied
in their deconstituted or decomposed condition, and they exhibit a certain
sort of intentionality. Following Brentano quite deviously, this is the inten-
tionality of psychic energy or libidinality. Third, although the repressed dis-
rupts, and thus announces its presence, as an energetic impulse or trace
within the purview of self-consciousness, it is never to be fully translated or
understood in terms of representationality.
To this understanding of Freuds theorizing up to 1915, we must add a
reading of the essay written 5 years later. This is not the time to review
how the psychoanalytic world has been divided over the various interpreta-
tions of Todestrieb, nor to critique what I consider to be mistaken paths
not just Jones (1927) notion of aphanisis, picked up by Lacan (196480),
Federns ideas from the early 1930s about mortido (see his sons 1974 paper)
or Weisss destrudo (1935), but also, of course, the prevalent interpretation
of Todestrieb as an innate propensity of destructiveness by the Kleinian
school (e.g., Bell, 2008; Segal, 1997). Rather, I want to follow the sugges-
tion offered by Laplanche (1992, 20002006) in the latter part of his career;
namely that Lebenstrieb and Todestrieb are not really drives per se so
much as principles by which drive forces operate. Lebenstrieb names the
process of binding psychic energy to representations (coming from the
unknowable navel into the domain of the preconscious), and Todestrieb
names the process of unbinding. This argument is only compelling if you
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accept Laplanches thesis that drive or psychic energy is never identical

with the biological mechanisms on which it leans, is propped upon or fol-
lows from (Freuds notion of Anlehnung, regrettably rendered in the English
translation as anaclisis). I find this thesis not only persuasive, and necessary
to understand the processes of primal repression (Urverdr angung) by which
the earliest representations became differentiated from their substrate of
neural circuitry, but also essential for the viability of the discipline of psy-
choanalysis itself (Barratt, 2016).
From the standpoint of these readings, we can proceed to understand
why, and in what way, free-association is exclusively necessary for psycho-
analysis, taking this to be the discipline that listens to the voicing of the
repressed. We can also understand why other methods which I shall label
psychosynthetic not only fail to meet the challenge of listening to the
repressed, but may actually further obscure its voicing.

From the discourses of psychosynthesis to free-associative

deconstruction
If dreamlife is indeed our via regia or perhaps, more precisely, one should
state that the method of associating to the elements of the manifest content
of the dream is actually this royal road then, aside from the untranslat-
able navel, perhaps the most significant notion in all of Freuds thinking
about the structure of dreams, is that of secondary revision. Paradoxically,
this is probably the least discussed of all his ideas about dreamlife, yet this
revisionary procedure epitomizes the censorious mandate of our ego orga-
nization. That is, it epitomizes the censorious functioning of the domain of
representationality.
Secondary revision further obscures or obfuscates the unfathomable
unknown that is the animative navel of the dream. It does so by narratolog-
ically cleaning up, so to speak, the text of the dream, rendering it into
greater conformity with the rules of cogency and coherence that are
required for it to make better sense within the law and order of representa-
tionality. From one standpoint, as a synthetic and integrative transforma-
tion of representations, the procedure is creative, at least in a limited
sense. It is a binding or rebinding that elaborates the domain of conscious
and preconscious representations into potentially new configurations of
making sense. From another standpoint, secondary revision counteracts
the dreams dynamic exposure of places or dimensions of our being that are
unknown or unknowable; the exposing of its navel, its embodied source.
Secondary revision labors against the unbinding of good sense that is
inherent in the formation of our dreamlife and we must add in the dis-
course of free-association.
In this context, we might well embark on a critique of the Jungian use
of techniques of active imagination as substitutes for the method of free-
association (Hannah, 2001; Jung, 191316, 195761). Such a critique could
also be directed at a derivative multitude of expressive therapies that
invite our ego organization to relax and explore itself more expansively
and dramatically. There can be little doubt that such techniques are often

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48 B. B. Barratt

therapeutic, facilitating an expanded awareness of the preconscious

domain of representationality and providing the synthetic means by which
to integrate this amplification of the patients self-consciousness. However,
in its operation, its aim and its results, the discourse of active imagination
is surely equivalent to that of secondary revision; the procedures of syn-
thesis and integration serve censorious functions, despite their manifest
creativity.
The disconcerting possibility, which we have not wanted to confront
(although Freud came very close to so doing in his 1937 essay on construc-
tions), is that the procedures of interpretation are vulnerable to the same
critique. Whether one uses the material of the psychoanalytic session as
data from which objective inferences are made and formulated into inter-
pretations of whats what, or one uses this material in a more dialogic
manner, tracking the vicissitudes of transference and countertransference,
again to arrive at interpretations as to whats what, the transformations
achieved entail the synthetic import of these interpretive insights that are
then integrated into the patients general functioning. I would invite us to
entertain the possibility that, even when such procedures are quite pragmat-
ically critical of the patients prior functioning and even when they eventu-
ate in very successful therapy, they are not genuinely psychoanalytic (and
they do not require the praxis of free-association). Rather, they ultimately
bind and rebind psychic energy in the apparent certainties of representa-
tional formulation. However creative they appear, like secondary revision,
they close over the navel rather than opening it up. This is precisely because
the transformative scope of their revisioning remains within the domain of
textuality.
Freud (e.g., 1918, 1919) argued quite firmly that his discipline is psycho-
analysis, not psychosynthesis, and that its cardinal discovery that of the
repressiveness of self-consciousness requires the method of free-associa-
tion. Again following Derridas 1996 essay (and against the mainstream of
much of our disciplinary history since Freud), analysis here implies, not logi-
cal analysis as the rationality of figuring matters out, but rather (in the
mode of a chemical analysis) a breaking-down. Free-association is a move-
ment that deconstructs the representational systems that censor the voicing
of the repressed. In this praxis, there is a perpetual moment in which the
certainty of the subject of self-consciousness (its conviction that it knows
whats what) is immediately and perpetually displaced or deferred by what
follows. In this sense, the instantiation of an interpretation is exactly the
juncture at which clinical processes cease to be psycho-analytic. Contrary to
the formulation of interpretations, which invariably have a certain sort of
fixative or finalizing character, an unswerving commitment to free-associa-
tion prioritizes the moment and the movement of unbinding. The creativity
of its momentum thus sides with the principle of deathfulness in its commit-
ment to listening to the untranslatable. Herein lies the power of psychoana-
lytic praxis to open the discourse of self-consciousness to the repressed that
is otherwise than textuality; and herein lies the distinction between our dis-
cipline and all the therapies that prioritize the discourse of synthesis and
integration.
Int J Psychoanal (2017) 98 Copyright 2016 Institute of Psychoanalysis
 Listening to the otherwise 49

Concluding note
What needs to be appreciated here is that free-association is not a means to
an end; such as the goal of knowing about matters that are other than the
subjects initial state of self-consciousness. Rather, it is an inherently
changeful process; indeed, changeful in a way that interpretation is not, and
can never be. This is because its deconstructive mobilization accesses and,
in a sense, listens to the repressed, as a meaningfulness that animates our
being and is otherwise than textuality. By contrast, interpretation, however
creative and epistemologically justifiable it may be, closes our ability to lis-
ten to that which is beyond the knowability of conscious and preconscious
representation. Thus the praxis of free-association effects an ontic change
a transmutation in the being of the subject which is not going to be
explainable epistemologically. The method intimates, and listens to, the enig-
matic and erotic signification of forces within us that are not translatable
into the languages of making good sense.
In this context, psychoanalysis is hyperbolic (or, as Derrida suggests, it is
hyperanalytic) and there is no pure psychoanalysis. The radicality of a
commitment to the free-associative method is reflected in Freuds intermit-
tently characteristic commitment to Copernican (as opposed to Ptolemaic)
praxis (cf, Laplanche, 199293). That is, when he prioritizes the ongoing
movement of analysis or deconstructive inquiry, the free-associative pro-
cess of exposing and listening to the voicing of the repressed. Significantly,
with occasionally remarkable candor, Freud seems less than fully concerned
about the mental health of the patient more concerned with pursuing the
unsettling effects of psychoanalysis, than with the goals of settlement that
define therapy. In a 1918 letter to Oskar Pfister about the labors of synthe-
sis, Freud writes that the individual does that for himself better than we
can, and this injunction is followed by even sterner warnings against psy-
chosynthesis in his Lines of Advance essay a year later.
A hundred years after the period in which Freud made his great discov-
ery of this unique method (the period from the mid-1890s to about 1914 or
1915), the discipline he inaugurated is now at a crossroads (whether or not
this is generally acknowledged). If you forego free-association as the prime
method of psychoanalysis, then you can relinquish the controversial notion
of psychic energy or libidinality and/or the precept that the forces of drive
(Triebe) are never identical with the biological mechanisms (or Instinkte)
from which they are derived. You can also dispense with enigmatic notions
such as unfathomable navels, thing-presentations that point to traces of
lived experience that are erotically embodied (meaningfully inscribed in the
soft tissues, yet untranslatable into the languages of representationality).
You arrive at a cleaner, neater and more conventional psychology, a simpli-
fied version of the human condition one that has lost sight of the mean-
ingfulness of the libidinal body, but that is compatible with the empirical
investigation of behavior and much contemporary neuroscience. You also
arrive at a practice of therapy that is synthetic, integrative and convention-
ally creative, but politically circumscribed by pre-decided criteria of adapta-
tion and maturation. But is this psychoanalysis? I contend not. As facile as

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50 B. B. Barratt

such a practice may be at unearthing and gaining insight into the role of
preconscious, even deeply preconscious, ph/fantasies in the psyche, it conve-
niently bypasses the repressed, the untranslatable, and the libidinality of our
erotic embodiment. To listen to the voicing of the traces of lived experience
that animate our psychic life to open ourselves to the voicing of the other-
wise that is representationally untranslatable free-association is necessary.

Translations of summary

Souvrir a  lautrement : la discipline de le coute et la ne  cessite

 de la libre association dans la
pratique analytique. Lauteur de cet article fait valoir que seule la libre association permet douvrir
methodiquement le discours de la conscience de soi (les representations accessibles a la conscience
reflexive) 
a la voix du refoule. Cette methode est la clef de vo^ ute de loriginalite de Freud et la condition
sine qua non de tout processus analytique veritable. Les protocoles cliniques qui ne donnent pas la prio-
rite 
a un engagement inebranlable et constant en faveur de cette methode (et qui, en lieu et place, pri-
vilegient ou bien des formulations interpretatives, en tant quactes decisifs qui semblent fixer et finaliser
le sens dune experience vecue particuliere, ou bien les vicissitudes du transfert/contre-transfert dans
limmediatete de la situation therapeutique), prennent rapidement au piege le traitement, en limitant sa
capacite de reveler le pouvoir des processus inconscients. Sous linfluence de Laplanche, les principes de
vie et de mort theorises par Freud en 1920 (lunion et la desunion de lenergie psychique au sein des
representations) favorisent la comprehension de limportance unique du discours librement associatif, qui
ouvre la textualite representationnelle de la conscience de soi a la voix de lalterite, dans un au-dela de la
representation et de la raison. Cet autrement se donne a entendre comme la force du refoule qui fait
retour, comme lombilic insondable de la representation de chose , qui est eprouvee et exprimee
au sein du texte de la conscience, mais qui reste cependant intraduisible, la langue demeurant soumise a
la loi et et a lordre de la logique et de la rhetorique reflexives. Le discours de la libre association affecte
ainsi la conscience de soi dune facon qui differe radicalement des autres traitements createurs ( psycho-
synthetiques ou interpretatifs et integratifs). A cet egard, la position en faveur dune pratique de la
libre association comme condition necessaire pour un processus analytique veritable, est amplement jus-
tifiee.

Den Diskurs fu r das anders Seiende o ffnen: Die Disziplin des Zuho rens und warum die freie
Assoziation fu r die psychoanalytische Praxis unabdingbar ist. Der Autor vertritt die These, dass
das Verdr angte nur durch die freie Assoziation in den Diskurs der Selbstbewusstheit (der dem reflexiven
Gewahrsein zug anglichen Reprasentationen) einbezogen und in Worte gefasst werden kann. Die Meth-
ode ist f
ur Freuds Neuerung zentral und bildet das Sine qua non eines genuin psychoanalytischen Pro-
zesses. Klinische Verfahren, die sich ihr nicht unverbr uchlich verpflichtet sehen (und stattdessen
entweder deutende Formulierungen, die die Bedeutung einer bestimmten gelebten Erfahrung ein f ur alle

Mal zu fixieren scheinen, als ausschlaggebend betonen oder aber die Schicksale der Ubertragung und
Gegen ubertragung im Hier und Jetzt der Behandlungssituation), beschneiden das Potential der Behand-
lung, die Macht des unbewussten Prozesses offenzulegen. Mit Laplanche gelesen, erleichtern die von
Freud 1920 beschriebenen Lebens- und Todeskrafte (die Bindung und Entbindung psychischer Energie
in Repr asentationen) ein Verstandnis der einzigartigen Signifikanz des frei-assoziativen Diskurses, der
die reprasentative Textualitat der Selbstbewusstheit f
ur die Auerung dessen o ffnet, was anders ist als
Reprasentationalit at und Vernunft. Dieses anders Seiende wird als wiederkehrende Kraft des
Verdrangten, als unergr undlicher Nabel der Sachvorstellungen, gef urchtet. Es wird erlebt und aus-
gedruckt im Text des Gewahrseins, ist aber nicht u bersetzbar in das Gesetz und die Ordnung seiner logi-
schen und rhetorischen Reflexionen. Daher wirkt der frei-assoziative Diskurs auf die Selbstbewusstsein
in einer Weise ein, die sich radikal von anderen kreativen (psychosynthetischen oder integrativ deuten-
den) Verfahren unterscheidet. Unter diesem Blickwinkel betrachtet, ist der Status der frei-assoziativen
Praxis als unabdingbare Voraussetzung eines genuin psychoanalytischen Prozesses gerechtfertigt.

Aprirsi a cio  che e altro. La disciplina dellascolto e la necessita  delle associazioni libere nella
pratica analitica. Lautore sostiene che solo il metodo delle associazioni libere consente di aprire il dis-
corso della coscienza di se (ossia dellinsieme delle rappresentazioni disponibili alla consapevolezza rif-
lessiva) allespressione del rimosso. Questo specifico metodo costituisce peraltro uno dei pilastri
a di Freud, ed e condizione necessaria di qualsiasi processo autenticamente psicoanalitico.
delloriginalit
Gli orientamenti clinici per i quali il metodo associativo non rappresenta una priorita da mantenere con
impegno saldo e costante (orientamenti che privilegiano di volta in volta le formulazioni interpretative

Int J Psychoanal (2017) 98 Copyright 2016 Institute of Psychoanalysis

 Listening to the otherwise 51
come atti decisivi che sembrano fissare una volta per tutte il significato di un particolare vissuto, oppure
le vicissitudini del transfert e del controtransfert nel qui e ora della situazione analitica) dimostrano
infatti uneccessiva propensita a imbrigliare il trattamento, limitandone in tal modo la capacita di rive-
lare la potenza dei processi inconsci. Osservati attraverso la filigrana di Laplanche, i principi del Freud
degli Anni 20 di vitalita e apparenza della morte (principi che rinviano rispettivamente allidea di un
legame e di uno slegamento dellenergia psichica nelle rappresentazioni) aiutano a comprendere meglio
la particolare importanza che il discorso delle associazioni libere riveste nellaprire la testualita delle rap-
presentazioni legate alla coscienza di se allespressione di ci
o che appartiene a un ambito altro da quello
della rappresentabilita e della ragione. Questa intrinseca alterita e qui intesa come la forza del rimosso
che ritorna, come linsondabile ombelico di rappresentazioni di cosa esperite ed espresse allinterno
del testo della consapevolezza ma al tempo stesso non traducibili nella legge e nellordine che di tale
testo caratterizzano la logica e la retorica. Il discorso delle associazioni libere ha dunque sulla coscienza
di se un impatto radicalmente diverso rispetto ad altri tipi di procedure creative (psicosintetiche o inte-
grativo-interpretative). In questo senso, lo status delle associazioni libere, quello cioe di prassi neces-
saria ai fini di un processo autententicamente psicoanalitico, appare pienamente giustificato.

Abrirse a lo otro: La disciplina de la escucha y la necesidad de la asociacio  n libre en la

pra ctica psicoanaltica. Se argumenta que solo la asociaci on libre abre de manera met odica el discurso
de la autoconciencia (las representaciones accesibles a la conciencia reflexiva) a la expresi on de lo repri-
mido. El metodo es clave para la originalidad de Freud y el sine qua non de cualquier proceso genuina-
mente psicoanaltico. Los procedimientos clnicos que no priorizan el compromiso continuo y firme con
este metodo (dando enfasis, en cambio, a formulaciones interpretativas, como actos decisivos que pare-
cen fijar y concretar el significado de una experiencia vivida particular, o a vicisitudes de la transferen-
cia-contratransferencia en la situaci on inmediata del tratamiento), entrampan facilmente el tratamiento,
lo cual limita su capacidad de divulgar el poder de los procesos inconscientes. Por influencia de Laplan-
che, los principios de vida y muerte de 1920 de Freud (ligaz on y no ligazon de la energa psquica en
representaciones) facilitan la comprensi on de la importancia singular del discurso de la asociaci on libre
en la apertura de la textualidad representacional de la autoconciencia, para dar voz a aquello otro que
es distinto a la representacionalidad y a la raz on. Se da a entender que aquello otro es la fuerza del
retorno de lo reprimido, el ombligo insondable de las presentaciones de cosa, experimentado y
expresado dentro del texto de la conciencia, y sin embargo no traducible a la ley y el orden de sus refle-
xiones logicas y ret
oricas. As, el discurso de la asociaci
on libre afecta la autoconciencia de una manera
radicalmente diferente de otros procesos creativos (psicosinteticos o interpretativos integradores). En
este sentido, se justifica que, para que un proceso sea genuinamente psicoanaltico, se considere necesaria
la practica de la asociaci
on libre.

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