Free association (psychology)

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Free association
MeSH D005608

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. [1] 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.

Contents

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". [2]

Origins

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". [3]

"There can be no exact date for the discovery of the 'free association' method... it developed 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". [4]

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". [5] 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". [6]

Other potential influences in the development of this technique include Husserl's version of epoche [7] 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. [8] 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". [9]

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". [10]

The psychoanalyst James Strachey (1887-1967) considered free association as 'the first instrument for the scientific examination of the human mind'. [11]

Characteristics

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'. [12]

When used in this spirit, free association is a technique in which neither therapist nor patient knows in advance exactly where the conversation will lead, but it tends to lead to material that matters very much to the patient. 'In spite of the seeming confusion and lack of connection...meanings and connections begin to appear out of the disordered skein of thoughts...some central themes'. [13]

The goal of free association is not to unearth specific answers or memories, but to instigate a journey of co-discovery which can enhance the patient's integration of thought, feeling, agency, and selfhood.

Free association is contrasted with Freud's "Fundamental Rule" of psychoanalysis. Whereas free association is one of many techniques (along with dream interpretation and analysis of parapraxis), the fundamental rule is a pledge undertaken by the client. [14] Freud [15] used the following analogy to describe free association to his clients: "Act as though, for instance, you were a traveler sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views which you see outside." The fundamental rule is something the client agrees to at the beginning of analysis, and it is an underlying oath that is intended to continue throughout analysis: the client must promise to be honest in every respect. The pledge to the fundamental rule was articulated by Freud: "Finally, never forget that you have promised to be absolutely honest, and never leave anything out because, for some reason or other, it is unpleasant to tell it." [16]

Freudian approach

Freud's eventual practice of psychoanalysis focused not so much on the recall of these memories as on the internal mental conflicts which kept them buried deep within the mind. However, the technique of free association still plays a role today in therapeutic practice and in the study of the mind.

The use of free association was intended to help discover notions that a patient had developed, initially, at an unconscious level, including:

The mental conflicts were analyzed from the viewpoint that the patients, initially, did not understand how such feelings were occurring at a subconscious level, hidden inside their minds. 'It is free association within language that is the key to representing the prohibited and forbidden desire...to access unconscious affective memory'. [17]

Further developments

Jung

Jung and his Zurich colleagues 'devised some ingenious association tests which confirmed Freud's conclusions about the way in which emotional factors may interfere with recollection': [18] they were published in 1906. As Freud himself put it, 'in this manner Bleuler and Jung built the first bridge from experimental psychology to psychoanalysis'. [19]

Ferenczi

Freud, at least initially, saw free association as a relatively accessible method for patients. Ferenczi disagreed, with the famous aphorism: 'The patient is not cured by free-associating, he is cured when he can free-associate'. [20]

Lacan

Lacan took up the point. 'Free association is really a labour - so much so that some have gone so far as to say that it requires an apprenticeship, even to the point of seeing in such an apprenticeship its true formative value'. [21]

20th century

By the late twentieth century, 'analysts today don't expect the free-association process to take hold until well into the analysis; in fact, some regard the appearance of true free association as a signal to terminate the analysis'. [22]

As time went on, other psychologists created tests that exemplified Freud's idea of free association including Rorschach's Inkblot Test and The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) by Christina Morgan and Henry of Harvard University. [23] Although Rorschach's test has been met with significant criticism over the years, the TAT is still used today, especially with children.

Robert Langs helped to bring Freud's earliest work back to the forefront, which depended on free association and insight rather than decoding by the psychotherapist.

Criticism

As object relations theory came to place more emphasis on the patient/analyst relationship, and less on the reconstruction of the past, so too did the criticism emerge that Freud never quite freed himself from some use of pressure. For example, 'he still advocated the "fundamental rule" of free association...[which] could have the effect of bullying the patient, as if to say: "If you do not associate freely - we have ways of making you"'. [24]

A further problem may be that, 'through overproduction, the freedom it offers sometimes becomes a form of resistance to any form of interpretation'. [25]

Studies have proven the lack of relevance or validity of this method. [26]

Coda

Adam Phillips suggests that 'the radical nature of Freud's project is clear if one imagines what it would be like to live in a world in which everyone was able - had the capacity - to free-associate, to say whatever came into their mind at any given moment...like a collage'. [27]

See also

Related Research Articles

Psychoanalysis is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques that deal in part with the unconscious mind, and which together form a method of treatment for mental disorders. The discipline was established in the early 1890s by Sigmund Freud, whose work stemmed partly from the clinical work of Josef Breuer and others. Freud developed and refined the theory and practice of psychoanalysis until his death in 1939. In an encyclopedic article, he identified the cornerstones of psychoanalysis as "the assumption that there are unconscious mental processes, the recognition of the theory of repression and resistance, the appreciation of the importance of sexuality and of the Oedipus complex." Freud's colleagues Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung developed offshoots of psychoanalysis which they called individual psychology (Adler) and analytical psychology (Jung), although Freud himself wrote a number of criticisms of them and emphatically denied that they were forms of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was later developed in different directions by neo-Freudian thinkers, such as Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Harry Stack Sullivan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sigmund Freud</span> Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis (1856–1939)

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The unconscious mind consists of processes in the mind that occur automatically and are not available to introspection. Although these processes exist beneath the surface of conscious awareness, they are thought to exert an effect on conscious thought processes and behavior. Empirical evidence suggests that unconscious phenomena include repressed feelings and desires, memories, automatic skills, subliminal perceptions, and automatic reactions. The term was coined by the 18th-century German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dream interpretation</span> Assigning of meaning to dreams

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In psychoanalytic theory, the id, ego and super-ego are three distinct, interacting agents in the psychic apparatus, defined in Sigmund Freud's structural model of the psyche. The three agents are theoretical constructs that Freud employed to describe the basic structure of mental life as it was encountered in psychoanalytic practice. Freud himself used the German terms das Es, Ich, and Über-Ich, which literally translate as "the it", "I", and "over-I". The Latin terms id, ego and super-ego were chosen by his original translators and have remained in use.

Psychoanalytic theory is the theory of personality organization and the dynamics of personality development relating to the practice of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology. First laid out by Sigmund Freud in the late 19th century, psychoanalytic theory has undergone many refinements since his work. The psychoanalytic theory came to full prominence in the last third of the twentieth century as part of the flow of critical discourse regarding psychological treatments after the 1960s, long after Freud's death in 1939. Freud had ceased his analysis of the brain and his physiological studies and shifted his focus to the study of the psyche, and on treatment using free association and the phenomena of transference. His study emphasized the recognition of childhood events that could influence the mental functioning of adults. His examination of the genetic and then the developmental aspects gave the psychoanalytic theory its characteristics. Starting with his publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, his theories began to gain prominence.

<i>The Interpretation of Dreams</i> 1899 book by Sigmund Freud

The Interpretation of Dreams is an 1899 book by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, in which the author introduces his theory of the unconscious with respect to dream interpretation, and discusses what would later become the theory of the Oedipus complex. Freud revised the book at least eight times and, in the third edition, added an extensive section which treated dream symbolism very literally, following the influence of Wilhelm Stekel. Freud said of this work, "Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime."

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Psychoanalytic dream interpretation is a subdivision of dream interpretation as well as a subdivision of psychoanalysis pioneered by Sigmund Freud in the early 20th century. Psychoanalytic dream interpretation is the process of explaining the meaning of the way the unconscious thoughts and emotions are processed in the mind during sleep.

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Content in Freudian dream analysis refers to two closely connected aspects of the dream: the manifest content, and the latent content. Impulses and drives residing in the unconscious press toward consciousness during sleep, but are only able to evade the censorship mechanism of repression by associating themselves with words, ideas and images that are acceptable to consciousness. Thus the dream as consciously remembered upon waking is interpreted in psychoanalysis as a disguised or distorted representation of repressed desires.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wish fulfillment</span>

Wish fulfillment is the satisfaction of a desire through an involuntary thought process. It can occur in dreams or in daydreams, in the symptoms of neurosis, or in the hallucinations of psychosis. This satisfaction is often indirect and requires interpretation to recognize.

References

  1. ↑ "Definition of FREE ASSOCIATION". www.merriam-webster.com. Retrieved 2018-11-09.
  2. ↑ Pamela Thurschwell, Sigmund Freud (2009) p. 24
  3. ↑ Ernest Jones, The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud (Penguin 1964) p. 216
  4. ↑ Ernest Jones, The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud (Penguin 1964) p. 214
  5. ↑ Quoted in Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (London 1988) p. 17
  6. ↑ Quoted in Jones, p. 219
  7. ↑ Peter Koestenbaum, Introductory essay to The Paris Lectures by Husserl, 1998
  8. ↑ Eysenck, Hans (1991). Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire. Penguin Books Ltd., p. 23–24.
  9. ↑ Robert Humphrey, Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (1954), Berkeley and Los Angeles, Univerisity of California Press, 1959. P.43.
  10. ↑ Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (PFL 1) p. 328
  11. ↑ James Strachey, "Sigmund Freud", in Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality (PFL 7) p. 20
  12. ↑ Christopher Bollas, The Evocative Object World (2008) p. 21
  13. ↑ Eric Berne, A Layman's Guide to Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis (1976) p. 269
  14. ↑ Thompson, M. Guy (1994). The Ethic of Honesty: The Fundamental Rule of Psychoanalysis. Rodopi. ISBN   90-420-1118-1.
  15. ↑ Freud, Sigmund (1913). On the beginning of treatment. p. 135.
  16. ↑ Freud, Sigmund (1913). On the beginning of treatment.
  17. ↑ Jan Campbell, Psychoanalysis and the Time of Life (2006) p. 58
  18. ↑ Jones, p. 326
  19. ↑ Freud, Introductory Lectures p. 139
  20. ↑ Quoted in Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (London 1994) p. 67
  21. ↑ Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (London 1997) p. 41
  22. ↑ Janet Malcolm, p. 17, 2011
  23. ↑ Kaplan, Robert; Saccuzzo, Dennis (2009). Psychological Testing (8th ed.). Wadsworth, Cengage Learning. pp.  386, 400. ISBN   9780495095552.
  24. ↑ Patrick Casement, Further Learning from the Patient (London 1990) p. 160
  25. ↑ "Alain de Mijolla, "Free Association"". Enotes.com. 1908-02-26. Retrieved 2013-07-25.
  26. ↑ Frank Cioffi, « [Commentary on Macmillan 2001b] The rationale for psychoanalytic interpretation », in Psychological Inquiry, 12, 2001, p. 161-166.
  27. ↑ Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (London 1994) p. 67
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