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For Freud, the first patient treated according to the method that he called at the time the “free association method” was the “Rat Man”; and yet in 1905 he had written concerning Dora: “[…] I now let the subject choose the subject of the day’s work […] everything that has to do with the clearing-up of a particular symptom emerges piecemeal, woven into different contexts and distributed over widely separated periods of time.” However, in consultations and first meetings, we are frequently faced with toxic or explosive forms of associativity from which free association does not emerge spontaneously; nonetheless, we trust that it will in due course. In such cases, the analyst is in a mode of “evenly suspended” listening and his interventions are more processual than interpretative. The aim is to enable the patient to meet himself through the other.