Free Association

Compiled and edited from lectures on Psychoanalytic Technique given by the late Karen Horney at the American Institute for Psychoanalysis during the years 1946, 1951 and 1952. Further lectures in this series will appear in subsequent issues of the Journal.

Free Associating means revealing oneself with utter frankness. In spirit and direction it is a state of being that is opposed to selecting, preparing, figuring out or holding back. It is a telling what one is feeling and thinking while relaxing and at the same time concentrating on experiencing oneself in all possible ways. It is a concentrating on feeling inner life. Rambling, in contrast to free associating, is saying whatever comes into one's mind, the spirit of which may be unconnected to inner depth of feeling. This concentration on being oneself and feeling oneself is neither taut nor controlled. It leads to sincerity, depth of feeling. It allows and welcomes the emergence of any kind of image, feeling or memory, without pre-judgment.

The word “associations” is a loose one, indicating that which is felt and communicated, the individual and separate themes of a series of images, feelings or thoughts. Actually one association flows into another, but we can see a unity and central meaning in a particular group of images. A series of associations might be considered analogous to a series of short stories, each of which has a main theme of a plot and characters, a beginning and an end, thereby separating it from other stories in the group, but each of which is connected to the others in some way.

To denote the contents of the free-associating process as “associations” merely indicates that there is a grouping into sets, the items of which may be more clearly related to each other than to items in other sets. It is a way of identifying such sets or groups which has the drawback of implying that these are discrete entities. Such a notion of discreteness is misleading. Free associating is more