Freud was not interested in the dream as a paradigm of the
creative. His more restricted aim was to gain access to the unconscious
meanings of the patient’s symptoms through free association to
dreams. He did, however, allude to the impossibility of fully interpreting
any dream, even though the extraordinary range of his own
dream associations seems a pleasure in itself, equal to the delight of
interpretation. Furthermore, it seems likely that he would have agreed
that, once set in motion, free associations not only reveal hidden
tissues of thought, but become a network of thought that will continue
into the next day, and, together with other surviving networks, will
collect, sort, dream, and disseminate future emotional moments.
It may be a measure of Freud’s genius that this discovery, which would have been sufficient for many people, was only the first of many. For me, however, this is his greatest accomplishment. In a few years of work with his patients—affected by their rejections of his techniques—he settles on free association, and in that moment Western culture is changed forever. Many artists, like Joyce, were wary of affiliating themselves with Freud, yet grasped the psychoanalytic revolution, arguably more immediately and perhaps more extensively than did those in the psychoanalytical movement.
To find the truth determining one’s peculiar, inevitably conflicted
states of mind, one discards the energy to know how and why and
instead simply reports what happens to be on one’s mind in the presence
of the analyst. Of course, there would be resistances to this
request, although paradoxically enough a resistance often pointed
directly to the ideas that were being held back, but we would have to
say that an entire civilisation would find itself in resistance to something
so up-ending.
Yet, it is alluring, even when it brings up unwanted ideas. It is speech as true self, the verbal equivalent of Winnicott’s “squiggle”, or the moment when, according to Lacan, the subject discovers his own voice, revealed through slips of the tongue and curious wordings.
“It is through the unhampered play of its functions”, writes Stravinsky, “that a work is revealed and justified”, and, in the pure state, he adds, “music is free speculation” (1942, p. 49). Free association is also a speculation, a visionary moment in which the self derives from the prior day a hint of its future.
Christopher Bollas (from: A SPIRIT THAT IMPELS: Play, Creativity, andPsychoanalysis, Edited by M. Gerard Fromm, 2014)
