You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This volume of Jung's collected works brings together his earlier publications on word-association experiments, papers written during the period 1905-11 when he was working at the Burgholzli in Zürich. Some of the papers were written in collaboration with F. Riklin, with F. Peterson and with C. Ricksher.
Almost seventy years have elapsed since Jung undertook these series of word-association experiments, and one needs constantly to recall that during this period scientific research in medicine and psychology have undergone significant change and progress. Reading this book, I found that I frequently had to discount my research training and the current meaning associated with ‘experimental research’ in order to do justice to work which in many ways represents the origins of Jung's later thinking.
It is not practicable to give details of the book; instead, this review concentrates on the broad lines of the 14 papers and five appendices contained in it. During the period 1905 to 1911 Jung was greatly interested in the work of Freud. He recognized, however, that, using Freud's method of free-association in the treatment of hysteria, it was still easy to conceive that the ‘inexperienced person would get lost in the maze of ideas and would finally be hopelessly caught in a blind alley’. (p. 289) Jung thought that word-association experiments would help to overcome this difficulty, inherent in Freud's method. The papers in this book relate to Jung's work on the method of word-association which had already been used by his contemporaries—for example Wundt, Kraepelin, Aschaffenburg, Ziehen, Cordes and Claparede—but, until then, had not been used to explore the unconscious.
The first four papers describe in considerable detail how the association test was devised and gives a detailed analysis of the responses of 100 normal subjects. Four hundred stimulus words were given to these subjects, who had been taken from four groups: educated men, educated women, uneducated men, and uned