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Barnaby B. Barratt, "Free Association: A Contemporary Introduction" (Routledge, 2026)
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hello everybody and welcome back to New Books Network. My name is Philip Lance. I'm your host today and we're talking about Free Association. Does it really work? Do psychoanalysts really use this method today or do they just give it lip service? And my guest today is Barnaby Barrett, who recently published a book titled Free Association A Contemporary Introduction. Barnaby is a research and training psychoanalyst in Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa. He is a director of the Institute for Rediscovering Psychoanalysis and was previously professor of Family Medicine, Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences at Wayne State University in Detroit. In addition to his earlier books on the philosophy of psychoanalysis, he is the author of the award winning trilogy, I think it was the Sigourney Award. What is Psychoanalysis? Published in no, it wasn't the Sigourney Award.
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B
Okay, well no, it was the Definite award.
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A
Oh, okay, well, I'm sure it was a very prestigious award. What is psychoanalysis? Published in 2013 Radical Psychoanalysis an Essay on Free Associative practice, published in 2016 and beyond Psychotherapy On Becoming a Radical psychoanalyst published in 2019 all by Rutledge. So welcome Barnaby.
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B
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
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A
And I'm just wondering what do you think about my introductory remarks about free association? Do people just give it lip service? You know, it's a phrase that a lot of people. If you ask people what does psychoanalysis mean to you? They might say, you know, free association on a couch. And yet, when I was training to be a psychoanalyst, I don't think in the four years of diagnosis didactic seminars, I don't really remember them, any discussion of free association, except maybe barely in passing. And yet you have written an entire book about it. So maybe before we get into sort of what is free association? Because you have a very clear idea what it is and what it isn't, maybe you could say why you wrote a whole book about it.
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B
Yeah, that's a very good place to start. I don't wish to suggest in any way that your psychoanalytic training was deficient, but the truth of the matter is as follows. There are a huge. There's a plethora of things called psychotherapy out there. Most of them are aimed at changing behavior in a particular way that is predetermined or in changing our mindset in a particular way that is predetermined. And from the start, psychoanalysis has been rather different. Psychoanalysis started as an existential exercise aimed at increasing our freedom, our freedom to think, our freedom to feel, our freedom to act. And most psychotherapies nowadays are not oriented in that way. If you think of cbt, you think of dbt, you think of magnetic resonance therapy, you think of deep brain stimulation, you think of ketamine therapy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and even good old tea and sympathy counseling. Most of these practices are aimed at changing behavior or our mindset in a particular way. And psychoanalysis from the start has been different. But what happened to psychoanalysis was very unfortunate. And I've spent really much of my career trying to counter it. What happened to psychoanalysis was it started in many respects by Freud, although he did not label it as such. It started very much as an existential spiritual practice. What it became, particularly after the first two decades, that is, it started as that between, like, 1895 and 1915. What it became after 1915 was a set of theories about mental functioning, theories that many of us are familiar with. Theories of the ego, the id, the superego, theories of the paranoid schizoid position and the depressive position in terms of our inner theater of relationships, theories of the self and all the relations that it has that we think of. There are many of them. And what psychoanalysis quote Unquote, became, was the application of those theories to change the person's mindset in a particular predetermined manner. In other words, psychoanalysis became not a discipline of existential freeing of the mind. It became a discipline of instrumental reason theories applied through talking, applied through talking to change the mindset of the patient. This is actually, I think, very unfortunate because something got lost and my mission in life, at least one of my missions in life, has been to retrieve it. Now, free association as a practice is very much connected to that initial vision of psychoanalysis as a discipline of existential freeing. What has happened is it's almost entirely been forgotten by people who claim to be practicing psychoanalysts. So, for instance, it wasn't part of your training or emphasized in your training or, or it's paid lip service to. Freud himself, curiously, said that there is no psychoanalysis without a method of free association. And he said it three or four times in his writings. Even after he had developed these grand theories of the mind that I've just mentioned, he persisted in thinking free association is what is required, required to do the work of psychoanalysis. So nowadays, when we talk about psychoanalysis, the terms come to mean many, many things. And it's no wonder that the public is quite confused. Actually, in my opinion, so are many psychoanalysts. Quite confused. It's almost deteriorated in its meaning to signify any conversation that is about our inner thoughts and feelings. But originally, and this is what I'm trying to reclaim, psychoanalysis was a radical depth exploration of the body, mind, of our mental and our physical functioning. And that, I think, is where free association is uniquely important when we think about processes that can heal us.
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A
Okay, maybe we just quickly, are you distinguishing existential because from behavior modification therapies. I mean, just. Can you say briefly a bit more about what does it mean to be an existential practice?
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B
I think that's, that's, that's precisely where we should start. We're not talking about changing behavior in some deliberative, deliberate, intentional manner. Not talking about changing behavior. Not talking about changing what I'll call a person's mindset, their emotional and cognitive way of functioning in some predetermined fashion, which almost all other therapies, including those that call themselves psychoanalytic, are oriented to that. By existential, I mean that it has to do with an exploration of existence. It has to do with an exploration of individual existence, has to do with men. Meaning has to do with how our consciousness in some ways reveals the meaningfulness of our life to us and in some way conceals the meaningfulness of our life to us. So it has very much to do with questions about freedom, about choice, about individuality, and about the realities in which we live. That's what I mean by existential.
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A
All right. You know, I want to throw in here, too. It's probably important for people to know that you're one of the few psychoanalysts I know who actually sees what routinely? Eight to ten patients a day, four or five days a week. Five days a week. For many years you've been doing this.
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B
This is actually my 50th year of practicing psychoanalytically. My practice has become increasingly increasing. Exclusively psychoanalytic, by which I mean I see all my patients three to five times a week, most of them at three or four times a week, some at five. I see about. And I see. I only see about 10 or so patients in my practice until someone concludes their analysis and a space is opened up. So I'm working 40 hours a week on average? No, I don't mean on average. I mean 40 hours a week at a maximum. Sometimes it drops to 35 when one patient terminates successfully and the space isn't yet filled.
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I think that's pretty rare nowadays, and I think that adds a lot of credibility.
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B
I'm very, very fortunate to have been invited to South Africa, because when I arrived in 2010, there was a hunger amongst senior psychotherapists to learn to do work that goes deeper and more thoroughly than other forms of therapy, Even those that are oriented to a particular type of psychodynamic theory. There was a hunger for it. So I came here. I was invited here to train psychoanalysts, and I've been doing that for the past 15 years.
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A
In the first chapter of the book, you talk about how psychoanalysis heals and what you mean by healing. And I think you say that healing is not about the avoidance of pain or the avoidance of death, or about becoming better adapted to one's social and economic world. So what do you see healing as in psychoanalysis? What does it heal?
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B
Well, as I've been writing in my early books on the philosophy of psychoanalysis, I made the point that one of the central insights that Freud had was what is called the repetition compulsion, how we are all compulsively repeating patterns from our earlier life. Psychoanalysis, in some sense, is very much about the history of the individual. And the history of the individual breaks down not only into how everything we do is determined by what we've done previously, but also how everything we do is determined by how we conceive of our past, how we remember how we think about our past. And in that insight, out of that insight comes this notion of the repetition compulsion that all of us, to some extent, are trapped into repeating things compulsively, not consciously and deliberately, but unconsciously repeating things from our past that are not useful to us. So in that sense, psychoanalysis is not about better adaptation. Psychoanalysis is not about the avoidance of pain and feeling good. And psychoanalysis is not about avoiding talking about death or avoiding talking about sexuality in our body and how our body animates us, which are. Sexuality and death are two topics that most people would rather avoid talking explicitly and deeply about, rather than being about adaptation. Psychoanalysis is about freeing, and it's about freeing from this process. I don't think process is the right word. From this compulsion, we have to repeat the repetition compulsion. Psychoanalysis frees us from that compulsion. And in that sense, unlike other therapists, psychoanalysis is really about freeing. It's usually attributed to Bob Marley, but actually it was Marcus Garvey who said, the great anti colonialist who said, emancipate yourself from mental slavery. But what does mental slavery actually mean? Obviously, we are taught in school how we should think. We are taught, if through our socialization, to think this way, to think that way, to think the other way. There's a lot of pressure from our socialization that forms the way in which we think about ourselves and our lives. But mental slavery also is about the inner process of this repetition compulsion. And how you emancipate yourself from it, I think is crucially important to the process of freeing oneself, freeing oneself to live more fully, freeing oneself to live more creatively. Neither of which are particularly necessarily about adaptation to the difficult social circumstances in which we all live. Freeing then becomes the issue, and free association becomes the unique method for freeing ourselves from this sort of mental slavery.
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B
But.
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But first I want to talk about. I think it was chapter two. No, the first chapter two. So you introduced some ideas about language that are, I think, critical to understanding psychoanalysis. And this is probably the most intellectually difficult aspect of your work, especially covered brilliantly in your philosophical works in 1984 and 1983. But I think I've come to believe you can't really have a coherent view and practice of psychoanalysis if you don't understand certain things about language and how it works. And so maybe without referring to structural linguistics or deconstruction, which would be a shorthand way of sort of jumping into the topic, can you explain why speech talking is so important in psychoanalysis? Psychoanalysis, as many of us know, was thought of as was called the talking cure. Is it a talking cure? How so?
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B
I think the answer is yes and no. I think you're absolutely right to tell me not to talk about structural linguistics, not to talk about Lacanian thinking, and not to talk about deconstruction. So I will try not to. But can we shift from talking about language as such to talking about representation? If you think about it, for most people since William James, classic works in psychology, psychology is about how we represent things in what is usually called our mind. Now we represent things in our body as well. Our body contains numerous representations of our lived experience, past and present. The body keeps the score. That's popular to say now, thanks to Bessel van der Kolk, but the representations in our body are of a slightly different quality from the ones we think of as the representations in our mind. So let's talk about representations rather than language, because we have mental imagery that is not necessarily immediately expressible in language, if we mean language in the sense of English, French, Ise, Zulu or whatever. So why language is important, why talking is important? Talking is important because it is an expression linguistically of how we represent the world. Now, you could say moving and dancing is also important because that too can be an expression of how we represent the world, but that is slightly more difficult to access. So we talk in psychoanalysis. We talk. Now, how we talk is crucial. Why is it important? Language and representation is important because the representational system that we all have, we all live in a represented world. We represent ourselves, we represent others, people, things. Everything is representation. When we think about psychology now, representations do two things. They express our beingness, if you'll forgive that word. They express our beingness or our becomingness, how our being is always becoming. They express it, but they also conceal it. That's a crucial finding that comes straight from Freud in his early years, although Freud didn't really talk about it quite in the way that I'm doing. But language expresses ourselves. It expresses our thoughts, our wishes, our feelings, but it also conceals. And because it both conceals and reveals our beingness, we have to talk in psychoanalysis, and we have to talk in a particular way, which I suspect you're about to ask me about. We have to talk in a particular way that breaks open or goes to the cracks in the aspect of our stories about ourselves that conceals things rather than reveals them. When Freud discovered the unconscious, he discovered it in two ways, really. He discovered it as the way in which some thoughts are represented. But we push them away, we push them aside. We try not to articulate them, we try not to express them, we suppress them. And sometimes thoughts lose their representational. If they're particularly dangerous to us, they lose their representational form and get preserved as traces in our body, usually. And that's a different form, form of the unconscious or repressed form of the unconscious that uniquely free association accesses or can access. Does that make some sense, or have I gone too far too fast?
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No, you might say a little more about. If I was listening to this for the first time, I'd say, how does speech conceal? Or in what sense does speech does speaking reveal? And then what conceal? Can you connect the dots There, a little better.
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Well, you have to think about how one represents things. Let me see if I can give. Let me see if I can give a good example that you say something about yourself. Now, I think I'm going to just repeat what you have just said. You say something about yourself, and it does indeed express that, but it suppresses or represses other possibilities, other potentialities. Now, maybe that's still too abstract.
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How about if I say. If I say the word horse, the horse is not here. What we have is a symbol which stands in substitutes for a horse. But the horse I have in my mind might be different than the horse you have in your mind. Is that an example of how a word reveals something?
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B
That's an interesting example. First of all, there is no horse outside the representation of the horse. Your representation of a horse is different from my representation of a horse. But if I say to you I'm thinking about a horse, not only is it a different from whatever it conjures up in your mind, but in some ways it suppresses other possibilities. It suppresses other possibilities of things that I might be thinking about which horse covers. Right? So horse could cover. My representation of a horse could be a suppression of innumerable other possibilities of things, of representations that are unconsciously connected to horsiness, for want of a better word. Let me give. I hope you'll forgive me if I can give you an example from the world of sexuality, if that's acceptable, that heterosexual men often like to watch heterosexual porn, right? So they often like to watch the image of a man and woman copulating. When they watch that, they think to themselves very often, boy, I'm excited by this because I'd like to be that man. And that's the conscious thought. But what gets suppressed or repressed is that what is also stimulated, what is also stimulated or arousing within them is that they would also like to be the woman. There is a homoerotic arousal that is concealed by what is consciously represented as a heteroerotic arousal. That is very, very commonplace. So if I say to you, this is a horse, I might be suppressing the fact that actually I'm more interested in donkeys, or I'm using the word horse to refer to the fact that my throat is beginning to close over because I'm talking too much. You get the pun, et cetera, et cetera, that sort of thing. I mean, these are very crude examples for processes that are very sophisticated. And there are books and books written by Freud in his early years on this sort of Thing. Okay, that's enough for now. I mean, we can multiply examples, but I don't think we'll satisfy a skeptical audience by multiplying examples. In a way, you have to be in the mode of free association to understand more how this works. Which brings me to one other thing I want to say about psychoanalysis is psychoanalysis, in a way, is simply a way of listening to the stream of consciousness that doesn't take it at face value that our stream of consciousness has a manifest meanings. And in psychoanalysis, we develop a way of listening to the stream of consciousness which enables us to grasp in some way or to intuit the depths, the unconscious depths that underlie the manifest flow of consciousness. So, for instance, when you said to me, let's take an example, I'm thinking about a horse, you know, what if in a few minutes time we discover that in fact you're losing your voice, you're becoming horse. See, I mean, that's a pun. But our consciousness plays on puns, it plays on phonemes, it plays on all sorts of different ways of using language that conceal as much as they reveal our unconscious mind. And that's why free association is essentially about language.
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A
Yeah, and there's probably something there about how horse, in terms of the throat, begins to take us, move us back towards something embodied and sensual.
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B
And I mean, I'll give you another example which is also of a pun. Was a patient who started psychoanalysis with me and came in relatively few months into her analysis and said, I had an awful dream last night. I was being attacked by a swarm of bees. Now, what comes about, as one eventually discovers through the association, is that she started to see me four times a week. And I am Barna Bee Burgess Barat. So there's a swarm of bees right there embedded in my name. And she had translated it into an acceptable image. She didn't say my dream was being attacked by Barnaby. She says my dream was being attacked by a swarm of bees. A swarm of bees both disguises and expresses her anxiety about starting deeper work with me. Does that make sense?
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A
Yes. Yeah, that's a very great example. Well, I was going to ask why should we. Why do you ask your patients? You were beginning to answer this, I think. But why do you ask your patients to free associate? And then I want to get into what is free association? Full on, what you call full on free association.
- [29:22]
B
Maybe we should go to that. Why you ask them to free associate is because. Okay, let's go to how do we start free associating What Freud said and what I have said and I've modified it somewhat, and other psychoanalysts such as the Lacanians, modify it again. And I discuss this in my book is what do you tell your patient? You ask your patient, what do you invite your patient into? What you sort of invite your patient into is, okay, you're lying on the couch, you're not looking at me, so I'm no longer a distraction to, to you, preferably, you've got your eyes closed. I, as a psychoanalyst, often listen with my eyes closed because if you take out the visual field, you're able to focus on reactions and impulses and thoughts and feelings internally. I say to the patient, please say, try to say everything that comes into your mind or everything that comes into your body without censoring it. In other words, you're going to end up saying things that you normally wouldn't say in polite company. You're going to end up saying things about me. You're going to end up saying things that you'd rather not say, et cetera. Please try and say them now. That is inviting the patient into free association. They're not following the usual rules and regulations of social speaking of conversation. It's very difficult to free associate not. No one can do it easily. And sometimes it takes a long time for us to learn to feel able to do it in the presence of a qualified psychoanalyst. So what I usually also say when patients begin is you'll find it's very difficult to say everything that comes to mind. If you come to something that you feel you can't say, for whatever reason, you're embarrassed, you're scared, whatever, whatever, let's stop and talk about why it is that some things feel impossible to say. And so from the very start, when you enter into the world of free associated discourse, you are in fact looking at processes of censorship and trying in a way to allow the patient to free themselves from the automatic censoring that we all do all of the time in our day to day life.
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A
Okay? And I'm thinking, well, and so let's go on to the one thing that kind of. I absorbed from this, your latest book that I have found actually is in your previous books, but it hit me in a new way this time is your differentiation between soft free association, what you might call, I think you call it storytelling, free association versus radical, full on free association. Can you talk a little bit? Because I think too many of us think, oh, free association is just you think of one thing and you Talk about it and then that reminds you of something else and you talk about that. But I think you have a way of hoping the patient can go further than just those storytelling, one after another ways of pre associating.
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B
Yeah, I mean, this is actually, I think if you look at the literature on free association, and just as a preface to what I'm about to say, Freud said free association is essential to psychoanalysis. And he said even after he developed his grand theories of the mind and psychoanalysis became not an existential discipline, but a discipline of instrumental reason trying to make the patient compel the patient to change, he said it's essential. Consequently, psychoanalysts have often paid lip service less so nowadays than they ever did. I mean, in your training? Hardly at all. In my training, free association was certainly paid lip service to get the patient to free associate. But we never really talked about what free association is and what makes it free or not so free or more free than regular conversation. In the literature, there's been consequently a lot of lip service paid. In fact, one commentator said, free association is the sacred cow of psychoanalysis. Everyone refers to it, but no one knows what it is. And actually few psychoanalysts take it seriously, already do it. And if you look at the literature, and it's not a big literature, which is perhaps surprising, both not only in the Anglophone literature, but the French, the German and the Spanish literature, there's not so much written about free association, much less than you'd expect, given its importance, or at least what Freud said and I'm now saying is its importance. But typically in the literature, free association is presented as uncensored storytelling. So you go from one narrative to another narrative to another narrative, right? So I start with a narrative, I start telling my analyst a narrative about how I met Philip in the grocery store last week and he was buying groceries. And then I remember a story, a funny story from my childhood about my younger brother in the grocery store and how he got confused between, et cetera, et cetera, and bit here in oranges and apples. And then I start to tell a story about apples and my relationship with apples and how I'm allergic to them and buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, one story after another. And the stories may tell something in their sequentiality and how the critical issue then is how did one story go from here to the next to the next. So that is what the analyst listens for and the patient listens for. So if I start with a story about Philip and I move to a childhood amusing story about my younger brother. Is this implying there's a connection in my unconscious mind between Philip and my younger brother? I then go to a story about apples and oranges and so forth. How does that reflect on the prior story about my brother and the prior story about Philip? That's an example of sequential storytelling. Yeah. Each story in and of itself maintains a narrative form that is really governed by the rules and regulations of narration. And that's what I call soft free association. And it's very much what my predecessors in the Anglophone literature who've written about free association, Anton Kristen and Christopher Bolas notably, they think of free association very much as sequential storytelling. But each story maintains a narrative composition that follows quite tightly the rules and regulations of syntax, of semantics, of pragmatics. In other words, each one is rule governed and each story makes certain sort of sense in and of itself. And the move from one story to the next is what is interesting. Why did I go from thinking about Philip to thinking about my younger brother? You get the point. There is a more radical way of thinking about free association, which is to try to follow the stream of consciousness. Freud actually didn't use the word stream. William James did. Freud only used it once. He talked about the chaining or the train of consciousness. If you think about the train or the chaining of consciousness, if one closes one eyes and listens to consciousness, it jumps all over the place. So what I have advocated is that one try to get the patient to not feel so much the need to make every story make sense. In other words, my story about meeting Philip in the. The grocery store, I don't have to make sense. It can be more radically that I say whatever comes to mind. So in the middle of my story I'm distracted by a hiccup in my body, or in the middle of my story there's a twitch in my leg. So in the middle of my story I'm distracted by something that the window, the stream of consciousness jumps about with quite incredible speed. And if one encourages patients not to worry about making sense, in other words, if I'm telling my analyst the story of how I met Philip in the grocery store, I don't have to explain it all. If I'm interrupted halfway through by a twitch in my leg or a pain in my shoulder, I'm deliberately giving physical examples because the body speaks and, and the body speaks more in full on or radical free association than it's allowed to speak in soft free association, which follows the rules of making Sense, basically the rules of narration. So that is why I've tried to make this distinction between softer versus more full on, more radical. Free association is that. Yeah, it makes less sense, it's more jumpy, it's more chaotic, but it's more expressive of the fullness of the body and mind.
- [39:01]
A
Yeah, yeah. I saw something and I wish I would have brought it in. It was so beautifully written. But where you talked about how free association disrupts the minus of our speech, we think we own our speech and that we're in control of it. And what, in fact you want to get to is where it speaks me. It being the repressed, the unconscious, a part of us that escapes from
- [39:31]
B
the
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A
compulsive repetition of the stories we tell ourselves and the way we think about things. And was that Nietzsche who said it speaks me, or do you remember that quotation?
- [39:45]
B
It was grand. George Grodek. George Grodek was the person who wrote a thing, I think in 1917 called the book of the It. And the it being what became in Freud's 1923 theory, the ID, which is not quite equivalent to the unconscious, but is very much part of the theorizing of the unconscious. And the unconscious being bodily as well as mental.
- [40:15]
A
So that what we'd want to see and full on radical association is more, I guess, of a disruptive, incoherent almost and embodied incoherence. And then, you know, something is erupting coming in from the unconscious. That's beginning. I guess this takes me to my next question about your emphasis on being becoming, which I really like, how you write about it. And I'm trying to think maybe a way to understand it would be. So many forms of psychotherapy and other versions of psychoanalysis seem to be about trying to understand and make sense of and make declarative statements about the psyche. You had an unconscious fantasy as an infant towards your mother, and that's why today you're having that unconscious fantasy toward me. That's an effort to understand something about the patient. And I guess we could use the word epistemology, you know, knowledge. Whereas you say that psychoanalysis is not about coming to new understandings about oneself, but about being, becoming something else, something new, a new way of being, maybe that ties back to the whole. It's an existential practice too. But can you say more about being becoming?
- [41:44]
B
Yeah, I think this is excellent because we're going to a central point, typically. Yeah, typically, Especially in the Anglo American world, not so much in the Lacanian world, which is somewhat different. The world of Lacanian, French psychoanalysis. But typically, the way psychoanalysis has been understood is that one goes in and one freely tells stories to one's analyst, and one's analyst puts them together or helps the patient put them together in a new way. So psychoanalysis becomes about interpretation and about gaining insight. And you gave a hypothetical example of insight just now, though I can't remember quite how you phrased it. But you said something like the way you were treated by your mother was such and such. And that explains the way you feel I'm treating you now. Yeah, I think this is an insight, right? Close enough.
- [42:47]
A
Yeah, close enough.
- [42:48]
B
Okay, so this is an insight, and insights have limited usefulness. I can go out and I can use that insight, and I can try to use it to control and regulate how I relate to people in future. But Freud said something right at the end of his life, 1937, I believe he said insights are about as useful as the distribution of menu cards in a time of famine. Which is a very cynical thing to have said, but he said it nonetheless. So, okay, if I go into psychoanalysis, and this has happened for decades and decades in the Anglo American world, people go into psychoanalysis. They talk in a relatively uncensored fashion. The analyst helps them put together their stories in a new way, and they leave their treatment with a bunch of insights and interpretations that have been played out in the relationship with the analyst. If that is what psychoanalysis is, it has usefulness. It's a new way of knowing about oneself. It's epistemological, principally, it's about interpretation and new interpretations. So it's epistemological procedure, I think, has limited usefulness, and its usefulness has been overemphasized. What I think free association gets us to, especially the radical version of free associative praxis that I'm advocating and wrote about in my 2016 book, is that if you free associate radically, it's not just that you gain a new understanding or a new way of putting together things, a new way of narrating who one is and what one is and what one's life and one's reality is like. It's that in the process of free association being, aspects of our being or dimensions of our being that have been repressed and suppressed start to come to surface and be expressed. And this is enormously enlivening. This is allowing life, new life, to come up from our innermost being and get expressed, even if it's expressed chaotically and even if it's expressed in a Way that is nonsensical. After all, in a way, we put far too great a premium on the idea of making sense. And making sense can be an oppressive act as much as a liberatory act. But in allowing oneself to express oneself fully without the rules and regulations of narrative and without requiring that, we must eventually arrive at an interpretation. And an insight allows being, allows a new invigoration, let's use that word, a new invigoration of our being becoming. So psychoanalysis becomes principally an ontological act. Not just a new way of knowing, but new ways of being, ontology, being start to surface, start to become alive, start to get expressed in the course of a radically free associative psychoanalysis. And this is why I talk about psychoanalysis not as primarily epistemological. We have to go beyond the epistemology of new narratives. We have to go to what I call an onto ethical praxis, onto meaning. This is about our being and ethical, which, as I use the term and as some philosophers use the term, is not the same as morality and moralizing. Ethical meaning opening. Opening to what is opening to our possibilities of becoming. So psychoanalysis becomes an onto ethical praxis more than or going beyond the epistemology of narrative and narration and new narrative and new narrations.
- [46:59]
A
We're getting not too far away from our 50 minutes. And so I want to just sort of finish by. By briefly kind of itemizing some of the things we. We didn't get to, but that are in all of your books but that are so important to understand, such as the word unconscious and what exactly that means. Again, in my training, I didn't get a very specific definition or understanding. And there's so many different ideas of what the unconscious is. You have a very well defined and specific sense of it that comes through in all of your books. We also. What else didn't we talk about here? Well, the sharp difference between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. You did sort of begin to mention that the centrality of psychic energy, libido, desire, how all those words sort of work together, the importance of deathfulness and castratedness and psychoanalysis, the way that the analysts can learn to listen free associatively and thereby enter into the spiritual existential journey with the patient. So those are some of the things we didn't dig into really very deeply. But keep. Is there anything else at the top of your mind that you want to mention?
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B
Well, I'd like to say two things, one of which is the term unconscious has about six different usages if you take not only the neurological literature, but also the psychiatric and the psychological literature, it has become almost meaningless to say that something is unconscious, you know. So what I really have come to advocate is that for psychoanalysis, what is relevant is the suppressed unconscious, which is to say representations that are out of my mind, out of consciousness, but could be brought back into it potentially. And there's a huge range of things that are suppressed. Freud spoke about gradations in. In accessibility to consciousness, or the repressed unconscious, which is very distinctive to psychoanalysis but is also known about by some body workers and somatic therapists. The repressed unconscious being that a thought that is so dangerous that it loses its representational form and becomes into the body and is retained as a trace, an energy trace in the body. And that is a crucial distinction between suppression and repression that psychoanalysis introduces and that we need to pay attention to. So the unconscious has become rather valueless as a word. And I think we need to talk about the repressed and the suppressed from an existential standpoint. And the other thing you said, and obviously what is totally unthinkable and what becomes repressed has a lot to do with the Oedipus complex, which I have written about, and how we all become Oedipal and things, certain things, become utterly unacceptable to represent. That's where the repressed unconscious gets started. But the second thing is, you mentioned psychic energy, crucial to understanding, I think, why free association is ultimately important and certainly to understanding why the argument that free association radically is different from simply soft narrative association is the idea of psychic energy. Freud very clearly said in his early years that there are forces in the body, in our body, mind, that are neither purely material nor purely immaterial forces. Between what he said was in 1913, between our biology and our psychology, and that's psychic energy. And psychic energy as an idea, has been almost entirely forgotten within conventional psychoanalysis, within mainstream, quote, unquote psychoanalysis, which I'm sort of saying is not really full psychoanalysis at all. Psychic energy becomes a critical notion to think about how psychic energy pervades our body mind, how it can be mobilized or it can be made static, it can be frozen, we can be alienated from it. And that, I think, is a whole other conversation, but it's a crucially important conversation.
- [51:50]
A
Well, I would love to have more conversations with you about all this. I hope listeners who've made it this far are thirsty for more, and I hope I will be able to talk with you more, have some conversations. I might start a little podcast called why Psychoanalysis? Where I don't have huge ambitions for doing a lot of content, but just some important conversations with with people like you. And so I'm going to sort of give our little closing sign off here. But thank you so much, Barnaby, and thank you. And I hope this introduces some listeners to this particular book, Free Association A Contemporary Introduction. And if they like that, as I did, I hope they go back and read all your books. Because I've never come across such a rigorous, systematic, compelling, spiritually and politically enlivening writer about psychoanalysis. And that's why I'm doing this podcast. I want to share it with other people. So you've been listening to an interview with Barnaby Barrett about his book Free Association, A Contemporary Introduction here at the new book Books in Psychoanalysis podcast. If you have any questions or comments, you can find me at Hollywood psychotherapy dot.com or Barnaby, you can reach him at rediscoveringpsychoanalysis.org that's.o R G not dot com thanks for listening.
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B
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A
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B
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A
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