freud's fundamental rule

The fundamental rule set forth urges patients to say whatever comes to their heads, even if they they think it unimportant, irrelevant, nonsensical, embarrassing or distressing.

According to Freud, "whatever comes to mind" tends, through the favored mode of regression toward the visual image, toward a hallucinatory realization that is similar to the dream and its primary processes.

The statement of the rule alludes to certain critical judgments that the patient must disregard. The judgments that something is unimportant or nonsensical naturally attest to the ordinary aspiration to say important and logical things. The judgment against things that are "distressing" to say summarizes all the others. Thus, the conflict whose onset is postulated in the wording of the rule is one that, by attesting to the consistency of the patient's inner psychic conflict, ensures that the attempt to put the rule into effect will have a dynamic value. The analysand's task is thus to confront the unpleasure of telling. At the price of this unpleasure, overcoming resistance can be productive.