Free association

Free association is a kind of meditation.

It is very easy to describe but takes a bit of practice to get used to.

The method is this: notice whatever is in your head at the moment.

For instance, if you hear the word LOVE, something pops into your mind. You might not wish to say that word and so you'd look for another and another until you found one that was acceptable. BUT, and this is the key, there was a word – or a concept or a picture or a sound – that came to mind first. Free association builds on the practice of being able to notice that first one.

I don't use it exactly as a Freudian would but I think it is an essential part of self knowledge.

Before he met Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung worked on word associations. He found that some words were emotionally charged and it took longer for people to respond to them. You could make maps of which words were emotionally charged for different people.

Free Association and Dreams

When we look at a dream it is valuable to notice what comes to mind when we focus on parts of the dream. If I dream about a dog, what dog comes to mind when I think about the dog in the dream? It might be another dog, it might be an incident that involved a dog; it might be someone who I think of as a "dog". This is different from my thinking process which would be answering questions like: what do I think about dogs, or even what do I think about this dog in this dream.

Examples

Often we will go off on quite different tangents – for instance if I say the word BOOK, you might say "READ" "FIRESIDE", "HARRY POTTER", "VACATION IN MEXICO" and so on.

If I say TABLE you might say FOOD, HAMBURGER, "CLOTH" but you might also have in your mind a particular table.

If I say WINDOW, you might FRAME, MICROSOFT, MOTHER and so on. Your mind might also have latched on to the phrase WIN and you are off associating to the idea of winning.

If I say RULER you can go to power words, power people, you can go to TAPE MEASURES and so on.

If I say BUSH you can go to Trees or Presidents or anywhere else.

So the free associations are a different way of mapping your brain.