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, though 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:
- Transference - unwittingly transferring feelings about one person to become applied to another person;
- Projection - projecting internal feelings or motives, instead ascribing them to other things or people;
- Resistance - holding a mental block against remembering or accepting some events or ideas.
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'.
Read more about this topic: Free Association (psychology)
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