free floating attention
The attention of the analyst along with the ability to engage in free association. Subscribes to a mode of dispersed attention, and a desire to delay selection or criticism, in order to pay attention to everything. Freud wrote:
We must make no effort to concentrate the attention on anything in particular… For as soon as attention is deliberately concentrated in a certain degree, one begins to select from the material before one; one point will be fixed in the mind with particular clearness and some other consequently disregarded, and in this selection one’s expectations or inclinations will be followed. This is just what must not be done; if one’s expectations are followed in this selection, there is the danger of never finding anything but what is already known.. All conscious exertion is to be withheld from the capacity for attention, and one’s “unconscious memory” is to be given full play. (Vinegar, 2008)