Free Association – A Basic Psychoanalytic Concept

 

 

Free Association is the sole directive that Freud offered his patients.  He gave this directive in various forms, but the essence of it was: lie back on a couch and tell me everything that goes through your mind: all of your thoughts, feelings, and any sensations that might occur.  At one point he offered a metaphor.  He asked the patient to imagine that they were on a train ride in their mind and they were looking out the window the way you would on a train and they were to report to him what they saw going through their mind, just as they would report the trees and mountains and villages that they saw going by if the two of them were riding on a train together.

 

First of all, let’s acknowledge that this is impossible.  There’s just too much that takes place in our minds to fit through our mouths in form of words.  And we reference things in our mind that require a lot of explaining for them to make sense of to another person.  And some of what we think and feel simply can't be turned into words - those this directive encourages us to try to do that.  And, try as we might to do follow the directive, every time the analyst speaks, he or she interrupts us and we have to start all over again.

 

Freud’s hunch, and it turned out to be a pretty good one, was that the random thoughts that occur to us (and if you have never recorded your thoughts, sit back, take a pen or keyboard and record your thoughts and you will see that they go all over the place), are not as random as they appear.  They form patterns and make sense, just as the crazy images from our dreams do.  And, at least initially, Freud saw his job, the job of the analyst, to make sense of these ideas – to point out to the patient what was really driving the thoughts and actions of the patient – and he believed that explaining the organization of their mind to them would lead the analysand, through insight, to realize that there was a better way to do things.

 

This model did not stand the test of time.  First of all, insight didn’t always lead to behavior change.  And secondly, having a passive analysand is as ineffective as having a passive student.  In order to improve as an analysand or a student we both have to be active agents in the work.  We, as analysand and student, have to make the material our own – and it is even better if we can begin to both ask and address the questions ourselves.  Then we are no longer students but well on the way to becoming able to self-analyze or to be lifelong learners.

 

Freud begrudgingly allowed that his patients needed to be collaborators in the analytic process – but it was more recently – at the end of the last century – that analysts like Paul Gray, Anton (Tony) Kris, and Fred Busch articulated what the implications of that were.  And, as is often the case, even though these three analysts were working on closely related concepts, each of them put their own spin on them and the ways that they end up working analytically are very different.  But for a moment, I will treat them as a group.

 

From the perspective of this group, more or less, the goal of treatment is to facilitate free association – not a condition of treatment.  Freud’s exhortation to freely associate is not a condition of treatment, but the result of it.  And, again more or less, this group suggests that we can best understand the analytic process as a process of helping the patient realize when they are engaging in bound rather than free associations – and to explore what why we didn’t follow a certain thought.

 

Paul Gray, the “leader” of this group, suggests that an analyst should closely follow a patient’s thinking and point out when they deviate from a line of thought.  This, he suggests, indicates resistance to freely associating – or the presence of defensive functioning.  Once the analyst and analysand agree that something is being defended against, they can speculate about what that is.  The process of unearthing thoughts that we are uncomfortable with teaches us that they are more survivable than we imagined them to be and also helps return executive control to us.

 

Tony Kris relates free associations to the functioning of the mind – that there is a “thrust” (this is Freud’s instinctual drives) and an opposition (this is Freud’s repression – but we can think of it as defenses in general).  He is relating free association to Freud’s first, topographic, model of the mind – a model in which there is consciousness and a pre-conscious space, and an unconscious.  The opposition lies with consciousness and the thrust lies in the unconscious.  For Kris, the goal is to obtain a balance between these two forces so that, at the conclusion of treatment, a person can be vibrant – meaning their drives animate them, and they can be focused, meaning their opposition directs those drives to useful ends.  The “free association” of the patient at the end of treatment is not simply saying whatever comes to mind (that is psychosis), but articulating their experience clearly and directly.

 

Fred Busch applies the principles of free association to the second and more familiar of Freud’s models of the mind.  The structural model, with its ego, id, and superego, operates based on signal anxiety (not the anxiety of containing a dam of emotions that is swollen to bursting, as in the first model).  Anxiety is a signal to the ego (frequently a signal that we are not conscious of) that unacceptable material is emerging.  It is this signal that leads to the telltale switches of direction that Gray would have us attend to.  What Busch adds is that the collaborative engagement in tracing the functioning of the mind opens the analyst and analysand to cooperative endeavors that allow them to both address the issues that lie within the analysand that are causing anxiety, but also opens them up to collaborative work that allows for the kinds of growth in interpersonal as well as intrapsychic functioning that the relational psychologists focus on.

 

Free association is, thus, a technical cornerstone of analytic technique, but also a plays a key role in understanding the form and function of a healthy mind – and of understanding what gets in the way of a mind being able to self-correct and thereby grow – and thus helps us understand one of the critical ways in which psychoanalysis can help us function more adaptively.   

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