What is ’free association’ in Psychoanalysis?

This therapeutic method has been linked from its beginnings to Sigmund Freud's theory.

Free association is one of the methods most closely linked to the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and his followers. of 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 psychodynamic current.

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

What is free association?

Seen superficially, free association can be summarized in a phrase: "tell me everything that comes into your head"; an activity that seen from outside Freudian theory seems idle and lacks a clear purpose. However, is also a fundamental rule of psychoanalysis..

In short, free association is a method of 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 to circumvent the mechanisms of repression and blocking of traumatic and anxiety-producing mental contents. Thus, by having a patient play with language in an improvised way, the psychoanalyst would be able to reach a deeper level of understanding of that person's inhibited problems.

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 abrupt changes in mood and degree of mental activation.

Just before he began to formulate the foundations of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud was greatly influenced by Jean-Martin Charcota French neurologist who used hypnosis and the cathartic method to cure cases of 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 should be treated.

Freud began to entertain the idea that mental problems might in fact be manifestations of traumatic ideas and memories that are so stressful that they must be "isolated" and kept away from the and kept away from the reach of consciousness. The organism is able to maintain a certain balance between the contents that actually circulate in the consciousness and those that remain in the unconscious, but it 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 as they struggle to filter into the consciousness.

Hypnosis would be a way to make the blocking mechanisms of these hidden mental contents to be relaxed, making it possible for them to express themselves.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 us to know and work with the contents of the unconscious in a more effective way. Let us see why.

Freeing the contents of the unconscious

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

With this in mind, the psychoanalyst uses free association to allow the unconscious contents allow contents of the unconscious that may be behind the appearance of a mental disorder to express themselves in an indirect way, and thus 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 his mind, without imposing conditions or vetoing topics; thus, his self-censorship mechanisms 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 stringing words and topics together..

Thus, the logic behind what is said becomes the logic of the unconscious, something to be discovered by the psychoanalyst, who takes note of regularities in the use of symbols, themes that seem important but are never spoken about in a direct way. and which seem to act as the center of a whirlpool of sentences.

These hidden ideas and meanings are brought up by the psychoanalyst, who gives an interpretation of what he has just heard. These new meanings will have to be confronted 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.

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 free association and the whole psychoanalytic theory in general to be highly criticized, especially by philosophers of science such as Karl Popper; basically, "there is no way to set goals for oneself, basically, there is no way to set concrete objectives, implement a concrete method and evaluate whether it has worked or not, because it all depends or not, because it all depends on interpretations.

In short, a psychoanalyst's interpretation of the torrent of words and phrases that the patient emits during free association will be valid to the extent that the patient considers it valid; but, at the same time, the patient is not qualified to be a reliable knower of what is going on in his head, so he can always be questioned.

Moreover, the assumptions that in the mental life of people there are conscious and unconscious entities acting 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.

• The contents of the unconscious part struggle to emerge into consciousness, but can never be directly examined.
• Many mental disorders are the result of the clash between contents of the unconscious that want to occupy the rest of the psyche and the conscious part that tries to prevent this.
• It is possible to create situations in which the mechanisms of blocking the contents of the unconscious relax.