Free association (psychology)

Free association is the expression (as by speaking or writing) of the content of consciousness without censorship as an aid in gaining access to unconscious processes. The technique is used in psychoanalysis (and also in psychodynamic theory) which was originally devised by Sigmund Freud out of the hypnotic method of his mentor and colleague, Josef Breuer. Free association is the expression (as by speaking or writing) of the content of consciousness without censorship as an aid in gaining access to unconscious processes. The technique is used in psychoanalysis (and also in psychodynamic theory) which was originally devised by Sigmund Freud out of the hypnotic method of his mentor and colleague, Josef Breuer. Freud described it as such: 'The importance of free association is that the patients spoke for themselves, rather than repeating the ideas of the analyst; they work through their own material, rather than parroting another's suggestions'. Freud developed the technique as an alternative to hypnosis, because he perceived the latter as subjected to more fallibility, and because patients could recover and comprehend crucial memories while fully conscious. However, Freud felt that despite a subject's effort to remember, a certain resistance kept him or her from the most painful and important memories. He eventually came to the view that certain items were completely repressed, cordoned off and relegated only to the unconscious realm of the mind. The new technique was also encouraged by his experiences with 'Miss Elisabeth', one of his early clients who protested against interruptions of her flow of thought, that was described by his official biographer Ernest Jones as 'one of the countless examples of a patient's furthering the physician's work'. 'There can be no exact date for the discovery of the 'free association' method... it evolved very gradually between 1892 and 1895, becoming steadily refined and purified from the adjutants - hypnosis, suggestion, pressing, and questioning - that accompanied it at its inception'. Subsequently, in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud cites as a precursor of free association a letter from Schiller, the letter maintaining that, 'where there is a creative mind, Reason - so it seems to me - relaxes its watch upon the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell'. Freud would later also mention as a possible influence an essay by Ludwig Börne, suggesting that to foster creativity you 'write down, without any falsification or hypocrisy, everything that comes into your head'. Other potential influences in the development of this technique include Husserl's version of epoche and the work of Sir Francis Galton. It has been argued that Galton is the progenitor of free association, and that Freud adopted the technique from Galton's reports published in the journal Brain, of which Freud was a subscriber. Free association also shares some features with the idea of stream of consciousness, employed by writers such as Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust: 'all stream-of-consciousness fiction is greatly dependent on the principles of free association'. Freud called free association 'this fundamental technical rule of analysis... We instruct the patient to put himself into a state of quiet, unreflecting self-observation, and to report to us whatever internal observations he is able to make' - taking care not to 'exclude any of them, whether on the ground that it is too disagreeable or too indiscreet to say, or that it is too unimportant or irrelevant, or that it is nonsensical and need not be said'. The psychoanalyst James Strachey (1887-1967) considered free association as 'the first instrument for the scientific examination of the human mind'. In free association, psychoanalytic patients are invited to relate whatever comes into their minds during the analytic session, and not to censor their thoughts. This technique is intended to help the patient learn more about what he or she thinks and feels, in an atmosphere of non-judgmental curiosity and acceptance. Psychoanalysis assumes that people are often conflicted between their need to learn about themselves, and their (conscious or unconscious) fears of and defenses against change and self-exposure. The method of free association has no linear or preplanned agenda, but works by intuitive leaps and linkages which may lead to new personal insights and meanings: 'the logic of association is a form of unconscious thinking'.