What is 'free association' in Psychoanalysis?

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

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

What is free association?

Viewed superficially, free association can be summed up in one sentence: "tell me everything that comes to mind"; an activity that seen from outside Freudian theory seems idle and devoid of clear purpose. However, it is also a fundamental rule of psychoanalysis.

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

Somehow, Sigmund Freud suggested that free association was a way to circumvent the mechanisms of repression and blocking of traumatic and anxiety-generating mental contents. In this way, by having 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 category very broad diagnosis that served to encompass actions and forms of thought related to sudden changes in mood and degree of activation mental.

Just before beginning to formulate the foundations of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud he was greatly influenced by Jean-Martin Charcot, a French neurologist who used the hypnosis and the cathartic method of curing hysteria. Freud decided to make use of hypnosis to explore the ailments of neurotic patients, although it took him a short time to come to a very different conclusion about how the disorders.

Freud began to think about the idea that mental problems could actually be manifestations of ideas and traumatic 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 through consciousness and those that remain in the unconscious, but is not able to make 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 by struggling to filter into consciousness.

Hypnosis would be a way to relax the blocking mechanisms of these hidden mental contents, making it possible for them to express themselves 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 knowing and working with the contents of the unconscious more effectively. Let's see why.

Release the contents of the unconscious

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

1. There is at least one conscious part of the psyche, and another 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 content-blocking mechanisms of the unconscious are relaxed.

With this in mind, the psychoanalyst uses free association to allow contents of the unconscious that may be behind the appearance of a mental disorder to express themselves indirectly in order to 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 topics; in this way, their self-censorship mechanisms are relaxed. By creating a context in which language use can be chaotic, It is assumed that it is the unconscious part of the psyche that is in charge of linking words and topics to each other.

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

These hidden ideas and meanings are brought up by the psychoanalyst, who gives an interpretation of what he has just heard. These new meanings must 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 in a larger number of people and allowed reworking discourses of the unconscious rather than simply waiting for the patient to find a way to reconcile with the contents of the unconscious reviving them.

• Related article: "Sigmund Freud's Theory of the Unconscious (and the new theories)"

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 the theoretical framework of Freud's psychoanalysis and the epistemology from which it starts.

This last component is what makes both free association and all psychoanalytic theory in general have been highly criticized, especially by philosophers of science such as Karl Popper; basically there is no way to set specific goals, implement a specific method and assess whether it has worked or not, because it all depends on the 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 consider; but, at the same time, the patient is not trained to be a reliable connoisseur of what is going on in his head, so he can always be questioned.

Furthermore, the assumptions that in people's mental lives there are conscious and unconscious entities acting with an agenda 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.