The History of the Concept of Association of Ideas: David Rapaport,  International Universities Press, New York, 1974.

This slender monograph is not for light reading. It is a scholarly Ph.D. thesis (University of Budapest, 1938) rescued from oblivion posthumously. Essentially, it is a synoptic review of the contributions to epistemology by the major 17th and 18th century philosophers, whose concern with association was really incidental to their inquiries into the problem of the relationship between being and consciousness, that is, how can consciousness reflect or know external reality.

By means of copious quotations with expository comment, the young David Rapaport traced the early development of the concept of the association of ideas in the writings of Francis Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibnitz, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. After this historical period the concept passed from the domain of philosophy to that of psychology, and was destined later to become the focus of the psychoanalytic method. The title of this history is misleading, however, promising more than it delivers, since it “stops well before the elaboration of systematic theories of association, and before the formation of associationistic schools of psychology.” Nonetheless it does cover a formative and significant period in the prehistory of psychology and “provides a link with ideas that had largely disappeared from the psychological horizon.”

Actually the first historical analysis of the principle of association is contained in Plato's Republic, and more definitively in his dialogue, Theaetetus, in which he examines the psychic function, memory, which alone makes knowledge possible. The trail, which began with Plato, was to culminate in the Treatise of Human Nature by the Scottish empiricist, David Hume. Rapaport's treatise takes up the trail at the borderline between Renaissance and modern philosophy with a consideration of the contribution of Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), “The Prophet of Modern Science,” whose Novum Organum introduced a new logic of pure induction, proceeding from properly contro