Origins
'There can be no exact date for the discovery of the "free association" method...it evolved very gradually between 1892 and 1895, becoming steadily refined and purified from the adjuvants - hypnosis, suggestion, pressing, and questioning - that accompanied it at its inception'. Freud was helped towards his discovery, however, when his 'patient, Frl. Elisabeth, reproved him for interrupting her flow of thought by his questions...one of the countless examples of a patient's furthering the physician's work'.
Subsequently, in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud cites as a stuff association a letter from Schiller, the latter 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'. 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'.
Other potential influences in the development of this technique include Husserl's version of epoche 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. 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'. Freud developed the technique as an alternative to hypnosis, both because of the latter's perceived fallibility, and because he found that 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, and off-limits, to the conscious realm of the mind.
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'.
Read more about this topic: Free Association (psychology)
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