The limitations of free association.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Free Association↗
SEARCH · PubMed Health
Results for “Free Association”
Explore indexed PubMed citations for clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health research. Read source abstracts and follow each citation to its original PubMed record.
Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.
The therapeutic effects of the free-associative state of consciousness.
Free association is therapeutically helpful in the regulation of states of consciousness. A person who free-associates enters a particular state of consciousness characterized by increased subjective self-awareness and disregard for reality, together with implicit pulls for objective self-awareness and reality adherence. Free association facilitates the patient's learning to integrate and to shift flexibly among points on these dimensions. Tensions existing in the free-associative state are embedded in a similar tension between free associating and reacting to the analyst's interventions, so interplay between free association and intervention also facilitates regulation of states of consciousness.
Adult↗
Free association as a biopsychosocial probe.
Free association was used as an experimental approach in a pilot study of four healthy subjects. Physiologically simultaneous measurement of respiratory minute volume showed a wide range of moment-to-moment values, possibly reflecting shifts in emotional state. Psychologically, subjects manifested classical resistance and transference attitudes. These psychological findings were confirmed in a second study using seven mild asthmatics and six healthy comparison subjects. The asthmatics showed significant constriction of verbal associative productivity and also significantly greater "immaturity" in drawings of two humans and of an animal, serially administered before and after three free associative sessions. A third study of associative output after stressful stimulation, using 17 asthmatics and 16 controls, confirmed the verbal constriction of the asthmatics. Free association permits study of psychosocial context and, in particular, reconstruction of important self--other relationships. These factors are important in assessing the "strain" surrounding manifest expression of emotion. Verbatim associative productions from experimental subjects and from a patient in psychoanalysis are used to form a model of emotional processes in acute bronchial asthma. This is a special case of Engel's general biopsychosocial model of disease.
Adult↗
The structure of visual and kinaesthetic imagery: a free association study.
A free association technique was used to investigate the semantic structure of three forms of encoding: verbal, visual imagery, and kinaesthetic imagery. Kinaesthetic imagery involves imagined bodily identification with the stimuli (animal names) and is included because of its possible involvement in creativity, and in view of the importance of enactive representation in cognitive development. The analysis of evoked associations in terms of the propositional relations they bear to the stimuli, shows that the actor-action-object framework is particularly important in kinaesthetic imagery, and the whole-part structure in visual imagery. Verbal representation gives rise to various abstract and phonemically based association types. The relevance of these findings to creativity and to the concept of semantic memory is discussed.
Association↗
Free association and changing models of mind.
The method of free association, like most major psychoanalytic concepts, was developed in and has been conceptually tied to a one-person, intrapsychic, drive psychology. Psychoanalysts who have retained the classical, drive-structure metapsychology have continued to emphasize the free association method, while those who have shifted to a relational, two-person, interactional or interpersonal point of view have often minimized or abandoned the free association method. This article explores this unfortunate dichotomy and examines the ways in which the free association method, stripped of its unnecessary tie to drive theory and reconceptualized within the context of a two-person psychology, remains a valuable clinical method. Free association, as a method, can be useful to psychoanalysts of all theoretical orientations as a reminder of Freud's most important discoveries, that is, of unconscious mental life, psychic determinism, psychic continuity, and meaning, as well as of the value and priority of careful, restrained, and disciplined listening to patients and of taking our lead from them. The method of free association, with the corresponding assumption of the analyst's evenly hovering attention, provides a fundamental context within which our personalities and theoretical biases, instead of being disruptions or impositions, become active and analyzable aspects of the analytic process.
Countertransference↗
Priming in a free association task as a function of association directionality.
Two experiments investigated priming in free association, a conceptual implicit memory task. The stimuli consisted of bidirectionally associated word pairs (e.g., BEACH-SAND) and unidirectionally associated word pairs that have no association from the target response back to the stimulus cue (e.g., BONE-DOG). In the study phase, target words (e.g., SAND, DOG) were presented in an incidental learning task. In the test phase, participants generated an associate to the stimulus cues (e.g., BEACH, BONE). In both experiments, priming was obtained for targets (e.g., SAND) that had an association back to the cue, but not for targets (e.g., DOG) for which such a backward association was absent. These results are problematic for theoretical accounts that attribute priming in free association to the strengthening of target responses. It is argued that priming in free association depends on the strengthening of cue-target associations.
Adult↗
Norms for free associations and five types of constrained associations.
Normative data on verbal free associations and constrained associations of five types (opposites, superordinates, examples of categories, coordinates, and properties) were collected from 72 men and 72 women (mean age, 19.2 yr.). A list of the different responses given by subjects for each of 360 stimuli and the frequency of each response is available.
Adolescent↗
What is preexisting strength? Predicting free association probabilities, similarity ratings, and cued recall probabilities.
Measuring lexical knowledge poses a challenge to the study of the influence of preexisting knowledge on the retrieval of new memories. Many tasks focus on word pairs, but words are embedded in associative networks, so how should preexisting pair strength be measured? It has been measured by free association, similarity ratings, and co-occurrence statistics. Researchers interpret free association response probabilities as unbiased estimates of forward cue-to-target strength. In Study 1, analyses of large free association and extralist cued recall databases indicate that this interpretation is incorrect. Competitor and backward strengths bias free association probabilities, and as with other recall tasks, preexisting strength is described by a ratio rule. In Study 2, associative similarity ratings are predicted by forward and backward, but not by competitor, strength. Preexisting strength is not a unitary construct, because its measurement varies with method. Furthermore, free association probabilities predict extralist cued recall better than do ratings and co-occurrence statistics. The measure that most closely matches the criterion task may provide the best estimate of the identity of preexisting strength.
Comprehension↗
What is free association and what does it measure?
This paper reports the results of a study of free association in which participants were asked to produce the first two words to come to mind. The findings were used to estimate the reliability of indices of strength and set size for different types of items and to model free association as a retrieval task. When confined to first responses, reliability was generally high for both indices, particularly for words with smaller sets of associates and stronger primaries. When second responses were included, reliability declined. A second response added new but weak items to the set, and, when the primary associate was not produced on the first opportunity, it tended not to be produced on the second. Relative to when multiple responses are requested, first-response free association provides more reliable indices of the relative strength and set size for a word's strongest associates. A model of free association assuming that a strength distribution underlies each response provided a good fit to the data.
Free Association↗
Jung's analysis of Sabina Spielrein and his use of Freud's free association method.
This paper examines Jung's use of Freud's free association method and his own association experiments in his analysis of Sabina Spielrein in 1904-1905. Jung's gradual rejection of the Freudian free association method is noted. By the time of their split in 1913, Jung came to view Freud's method of using associations to analyse personal complexes as reductive, limiting and backward-looking. He also felt that the Freudian method threatened the analysand by creating confusion and a regressive dependency on the analyst. Jung's early approach inclined away from personal pain in favour of analysing autonomous, impersonal and collective phenomena. The historical question is raised whether Jung's rejection of the use of the free associations of the individual analysand might be as fundamental as their well-known disagreement about Freud's belief in the central role of sexuality in neurosis.
Female↗
What does the analyst want? Free association in relation to the analyst's activity, ambition, and technical innovation.
The author traces the history of free association, the "fundamental rule," through the Freud-Ferenczi relationship and controversy. The use of "activity," first proposed by Freud in 1910 with phobic and compulsive patients, was then championed by Ferenczi in the early twenties. The goal of activity was to enhance-or, more accurately, "to force"--the associations into the analysis. Subsequently, Ferenczi reversed himself, concluding that his analysis was re-creating the traumatic parental environment which originally caused the patient's neurosis. The far-reaching results of Ferenczi's change of heart included a redefinition of countertransference and added the techniques of "indulgence" and "relaxation" to soften Freud's emphasis on "abstinence" and "frustration. A vignette from the analysis of a dangerously self-destructive bulimic patient illustrates the value of free association in helping a patient feel understood by the analyst without pressure to give up her symptoms. Constantly monitoring his therapeutic ambition, the analyst demonstrates the value of free association in enhancing the patient's understanding of herself and of the survival value of her symptoms. This vignette highlights the fact that the analyst's therapeutic ambition makes freedom to associate even more difficult for the patient and inevitably intrudes on the analyst's evenly hovering attention. Of course for the analyst to have a therapeutic wish is necessary and desirable but for the analyst to demand change promotes compliance and hidden rebellion which limits the analysis.
Adult↗
Shall drawing become part of free association?: Proposal for a modification in psychoanalytic technique.
Three psychoanalytic case vignettes are presented where drawing is used beneficially as part of the free-associative process. The history of the psychoanalytic use of drawing is briefly reviewed, together with a new technical proposal regarding the role of drawing in free association. Justification for testing this modification leads to a consideration of methodological issues and the nature of free association. Possible advantages of this modification, including enhanced clinical understanding through integration of pictorial and verbal modes, and greater potential for access to the period of life where experience is more visually dominated, are considered and also discussed in relation to dual hemispheric mental organization.
Adult↗
Free association reconsidered: the talking cure, the writing cure.
It has not been fully appreciated that psychoanalysis, in its origins, was both a talking and a writing cure. When Freud instructed his patients to say whatever came to mind, using words to verbalize that which was preconscious replaced the hypnotic technique as the "talking cure" and was the beginning of the psychoanalytic method. Freud used writing to an internal other in his self-analysis, and his free association writing has had an enormous influence on psychoanalysis. This author has introduced writing into the treatment of some patients and has found it invaluable with psychosomatic patients, including those who suffer from eating disorders and self-injury, because they tend to use their bodies rather than words to express emotions. Today's "widening scope" evokes a need to develop newer techniques, especially with patients who are unusually resistant to free associating or whose thinking is presymbolic. Caution must be taken that writing eases the resistance to free association and does not serve as a source of resistance itself, and that it serves creative rather than destructive aims. A little-known event in psychoanalytic history is instructive: E. Pickworth Farrow, a former psychoanalytic patient, devised a self-analytic process through writing down his free associations.
Adult↗
Free association as a method of self-observation in relation to other methodological principles of psychoanalysis.
The method of free association, especially in its self-observative aspect, may be seen as a useful criterion for differentiating among various clinical approaches to psychoanalysis, not only as they evolved in the course of its history but also as they are being practiced today. It is suggested that it may be of some relevance to view the existing variants of clinical psychoanalysis as being based upon differing emphases on one or another of the basic operational concepts, such as free association, interpretation, and the mental disposition of the analyst.
Free Association↗
Revisiting free energy calculations: a theoretical connection to MM/PBSA and direct calculation of the association free energy.
The prediction of absolute ligand-receptor binding affinities is essential in a wide range of biophysical queries, from the study of protein-protein interactions to structure-based drug design. End-point free energy methods, such as the Molecular Mechanics Poisson-Boltzmann Surface Area (MM/PBSA) model, have received much attention and widespread application in recent literature. These methods benefit from computational efficiency as only the initial and final states of the system are evaluated, yet there remains a need for strengthening their theoretical foundation. Here a clear connection between statistical thermodynamics and end-point free energy models is presented. The importance of the association free energy, arising from one molecule's loss of translational and rotational freedom from the standard state concentration, is addressed. A novel method for calculating this quantity directly from a molecular dynamics simulation is described. The challenges of accounting for changes in the protein conformation and its fluctuations from separate simulations are discussed. A simple first-order approximation of the configuration integral is presented to lay the groundwork for future efforts. This model has been applied to FKBP12, a small immunophilin that has been widely studied in the drug industry for its potential immunosuppressive and neuroregenerative effects.
Binding Sites↗
Some ambiguities in the method of free association and their implications for technique.
The method of free association, rooted in the topographic model, has not been clearly defined in structural terms. Little changed since Freud; the method is geared toward overcoming rather than investigating resistances. Furthermore, it is designed to discourage rather than encourage self-analysis. This seems to be another example of a "developmental lag" in adapting the psychology of the ego to clinical technique.
Defense Mechanisms↗
Free association and repression-sensitization.
It was predicted that Subjects' scores on Byrne's Repression-Sensitization (R-S) Scale would be related to free associative style. When administered the R-S Scale, Subjects at the high and low extremes then took part in a free association task. Repressers manifested a prevalence of "avoidant" and sensitizers a prevalence of "approach" associations. However, this was true only of male Subjects.
Aggression↗
The central phobic position: a new formulation of the free association method.
The author discusses a particular quality of associative behaviour observed in some borderline patients, and its role in maintaining a central defensive position, clearly discernible in a complex use of the analyst, and a particular functioning of the mind that the author terms phobic. Illustrating his argument with a detailed clinical account of the gradual joining of associative themes in one particular patient, the author both demonstrates the theory underlying his practice and exemplifies the deeper theoretical underpinning of his approach to psychoanalysis. This implies a new formulation of the free association method. By constructing an analytic space in which free association and psychoanalytic listening are possible, the analyst can voice and link previously catastrophic ideas, quite unknown to the patient's consciousness, to help the patient to create meaning and obtain relief from previously dominant but unknown terrors. Concluding his paper, the author links his clinical account both to his ideas on temporality and negativity and to the relationship between oedipal and pre-oedipal elements.
Adult↗