ABSTRACT
In psychoanalysis, the spirit of Othello's request to "speak to me as to thy thinkings" continues to remain an implicit injunction, even if not a "basic rule" (Freud, 1913), that an analyst hopes his patient will take to heart. It is not, however, a principle that is intended to organize an analyst's own stance-not if he hopes to relate therapeutically to his patient. As an unmodified and unmodulated analytic posture, free disclosure of the analyst's thinking will create an atmosphere that is inherently so unsafe, affectively, that the patient will minimize access to his unconscious processes in the interest of maintaining attachment. In some cases such a posture can be even a recipe for affective retraumatization of the patient.
