Free association (psychology)

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Constructs Psychosexual development Psychosocial development Conscious • Preconscious • Unconscious Psychic Apparatus Id, ego, and super-ego Libido • Drive Transference • Sublimation • Resistance Important figures Sigmund Freud • Carl Jung Alfred Adler • Otto Rank Anna Freud • Margaret Mahler Karen Horney • Jacques Lacan Ronald Fairbairn • Melanie Klein Harry Stack Sullivan Erik Erikson • Nancy Chodorow Susan Sutherland Isaacs Ernest Jones • Heinz Kohut Important works The Interpretation of Dreams Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" Civilization and Its Discontents Schools of thought Self psychology • Lacanian Analytical psychology • Object relations Interpersonal • Relational Ego psychology
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Free association (Psychodynamic theory) is a technique used in psychology, devised by Sigmund Freud

In free-association, patients are asked to continually relate anything which comes into their minds, regardless of how superficially unimportant or potentially embarrassing the memory threatens to be. This technique assumes that all memories are arranged in a single associative network, and that sooner or later the subject will stumble across the crucial memory.

Suggested influences on the technique include Husserl's version of epoche^[1] and the work of Sir Francis Galton. Freud developed the technique as an alternative to hypnosis, both because of its perceived fallibility and because he found that patients could recover and comprehend crucial memories while conscious. However, Freud found 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'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 the study of the mind.