2

« Free association » remains at the heart of the analytic method but the development in theories of the treatment makes it difficult to assess its practical and metapsychological implications. To try to explain them, the author introduces a distinction between « free association » and « associativity »: the first results from a conscious subject voluntarily using a « procedure for the investigation of mental processes that are almost inaccessible in any other way » (Freud, 1923, p. 235); the second refers to the associative linkages, possibly involuntary, unconscious, which in the restricted situation under the aegis of the fundamental rule are part of the process that constitutes the treatment. By using various facets of this opposition, the author shows how the objectivation of an unconscious determinism sought by the procedure is challenged by the consequences of the rule: the coupling of free association and evenly suspended attention leading to the methodological privilege of the transference/countertransference pair.