ABSTRACT
I have found it very difficult to gather material on free association and present an orderly account of it, for the pertinent psychoanalytical literature frequently consists of random comments, sorts of free associations about free associations. Given Freud's readiness to say that for many people the technique of free association was ‘the most important contribution made by psychoanalysis’ (letter to Stefan Zweig, Feb. 7, 1931), 1 it becomes all the more surprising that, relative to every other psychoanalytical topic, there are so few sustained studies of free association. This topic presents many pitfalls and little comfortable terrain to the probing adventurer. In any treatment of free association, a methodological challenge imposes its presence from the very beginning, for ultimately free association embraces so much—transference, symptomatology, the economic system, etc. And yet to include everything in the term is to render one's task unfeasible from the very outset. Hence as an initial approach I have elected to follow some vague consensus and thereby track down the term and its partial synonyms (basic or fundamental rule) as a rubric listed in bibliographies and book indexes. I have preferred, too, to avoid dealing with rigorous definition of the term at the very beginning and rather to coast into the topic through a historical sketch of the practice of free association. It will be seen that my general orientation to free association is guided by its meaning as a therapeutic technique of uncovery and not as a philosophical theory about ideas (the history of the latter was partly traced by Rapaport's doctorate dissertation written in 1929, and translated and republished in 1974).
