From early on in his career, at the time of his treatment of Frau Emmy von N., Freud (Breuer and Freud 1895) recognized the value of listening to the patient's material without attempting to steer it along a particular course. His focus on the method of freie Einfalle (free association), to be presented to the patient as the fundamental rule of analytic treatment, led to his recommendation that the analyst listen with evenly suspended attention (Freud ). But is free association therapeutic in and of itself? The author proposes an affirmative reply to this question based on the contribution of free association to the patient's nascent ability to shift between active and passive modes of cognition.