Free association is one of the methods most closely linked to the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and his followers. At the time, this strategy served to replace hypnosis and the cathartic method in the clinical practice of the time, and today it is still widely used in the various schools of psychology related to the psychodynamic current.

In this article we will see what exactly free association consists of and what theoretical assumptions it is based on.

What is free association?

Seen superficially, free association can be summed up in one sentence: “tell me everything that comes into your head”; an activity that seen from outside Freudian theory seems idle and lacking in clear purpose. However, is also a fundamental rule of psychoanalysis .

In short, free association is a method for making some aspects of ideas and memories that are too traumatic to be accessible to consciousness (understood within the theoretical framework of psychoanalysis) can be revealed indirectly through language .

In a way, Sigmund Freud proposed that free association was a way of circumventing the mechanisms of repression and blocking of traumatic and anxiety-generating mental content. In this way, by making a patient play with language in an improvised way, the psychoanalyst would be able to reach a deeper level of understanding about the inhibited problems of that person.

The birth of the concept

Free association was born in a historical context in which it was necessary to treat many patients with neurotic-type mental disorders, a very broad diagnostic category that served to encompass actions and ways of thinking related to sudden changes in mood and the degree of mental activation.

Just before starting to formulate the basis of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud was greatly influenced by Jean-Martin Charcot , a French neurologist who used hypnosis and the cathartic method to cure cases of hysteria. Freud decided to use hypnosis to explore the ailments of neurotic patients, although it took him a short time to reach a very different conclusion about how the disorders should be treated.

Freud began to think about the idea that mental problems could actually be manifestations of traumatic ideas and memories that are so stressful that they must be “isolated” and kept out of the reach of consciousness. The organism is capable of maintaining a certain balance between the contents that actually circulate in the consciousness and those that remain in the unconscious, but it is not capable of making the latter disappear, it only keeps them blocked. However, sometimes the contents to be repressed are so powerful that they generate the symptoms of the disorders as they struggle to filter into the consciousness.

Hypnosis would be a way to make the mechanisms of blocking these hidden mental contents relaxed , making it possible for them to be expressed more clearly (although always indirectly). Something similar would happen with dreams: Freud interpreted them as hypothetical manifestations of the unconscious and repressed, passed through a filter of symbolism.

But free association would allow us to know and work with the contents of the unconscious more effectively. Let’s see why.

Releasing the contents of the unconscious

As we have seen, the method of free association is based on these assumptions:

  1. There is at least one conscious part of the psyche, and one that is unconscious.
  2. The contents of the unconscious part struggle to emerge into consciousness, but can never be directly examined.
  3. Many mental disorders are the result of the clash between the contents of the unconscious that want to occupy the rest of the psyche and the conscious part that tries to prevent this.
  4. It is possible to create situations in which the mechanisms for blocking the contents of the unconscious are relaxed.

Taking this into account, the psychoanalyst uses the free association to allow the contents of the unconscious that may be behind the appearance of a mental disorder to be expressed in an indirect way and thus be able to influence them through language mechanisms.

In this way, the patient is allowed to say everything that comes to mind, without imposing conditions or vetoing subjects; in this way, his mechanisms of self-censorship are relaxed. By creating a context in which the use of language can be chaotic, it is assumed that it is the unconscious part of the psyche that is in charge of chaining words and themes together .

In this way, the logic behind what is said becomes the logic of the unconscious, something that must be discovered by the psychoanalyst, who takes note of regularities in the use of symbols, themes that seem important but are never spoken about directly and that seem to act as the center of a swirl of phrases

These ideas and hidden meanings are raised by the psychoanalyst, who gives an interpretation of what he has just heard. These new meanings will have to be faced by the patient once the therapist offers him an interpretation of what he has said that fits with what he himself is unable to express directly in words.

According to Freud, this method was much more useful than hypnosis and the use of catharsis, because it could be used on a larger number of people and it allowed to rework discourses of the unconscious instead of simply waiting for the patient to find a way to reconcile himself with the contents of the unconscious by reliving them.

The problems of free association

With this, we have already seen the basic aspects that characterize free association. However, all this explanation is only valid if we accept Freud’s theoretical framework of psychoanalysis and the epistemology from which it starts.

This last component is what makes both the free association and the whole psychoanalytic theory in general very critical, especially by philosophers of science such as Karl Popper; basically, there is no way to set concrete goals, implement a concrete method and evaluate whether it has worked or not, because everything depends on interpretations.

In short, the interpretation that a psychoanalyst makes from the torrent of words and phrases that the patient is emitting during the free association will be valid to the extent that the patient considers it; but, at the same time, the patient is not trained to be a reliable expert on what is happening in his or her head, so he or she can always be questioned.

Furthermore, the assumption that in people’s mental lives there are conscious and unconscious entities that act with an agenda of their own is considered an entelechy, because it is something impossible to prove: the unconscious part will always manage not to be revealed.

Thus, in the practice of contemporary psychology free association remains one of the elements of the history of psychology, but it is not considered a scientifically valid tool.