FREE ASSOCIATION LISBON

In this series of seminars, we will consider body language and the musical aspects of speech as means of communicating unrepresentable, preverbal emotional states, as vehicles for unconscious projective identification, and as avenues for the practice of suggestion. We will then explore the complex historical and clinical relationship between psychoanalysis and suggestion, and propose that psychoanalysis distinguishes itself from all other forms of psychological treatment by understanding preverbal communication rather than deploying it for “therapeutic” effect.  We will go on to consider the use of psychoanalytic intuition and the analyst’s alpha-function to detect this mode of unrepresentable communication, and finally explore the implications of these ideas for the status of psychoanalysis as a science and for the practice of psychoanalysis as a treatment.