Introducing free-association

Given that it was the means by which psychoanalysis began as a discipline, it is strikingly paradoxical that the notion of free‑associative discourse has never been particularly well investigated or comprehended. Freud discovered this method in the closing years of the 19th century while trying to grasp the meaning of hysterical and other psychiatric symptoms. Yet well over a hundred years after his revolutionary labours—the period in which ‘psychoanalysis’ has history as a distinctive discipline—there has been a paucity of attempts to understand free‑associative processes in their detail and complexity. That is, what free‑association is or is not, what different styles of it there may be, why it has the effects that it has, and how it can have such a powerful impact upon processes of personal growth when undertaken in a genuinely psychoanalytic context. In professional publications, psychoanalysts and others often reference the method as significant, as if we all know what it is and what its variations or parameters are. Not enough effort has been directed to all the questions about what it is and why it is important (although there have been some eminent exceptions to this condemnatory generalization, as I shall discuss later).