Free Association in 423 B.C.: Socrates in “The Clouds” of Aristophanes

All men have the capacity of knowing themselves and of thinking in a healthy manner.

In all men, the mind has the leadership of the body towards both health and disease and everything else.

Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill.

Ernest Jones, evaluating the life and work of Sigmund Freud, without equivocation judges the discovery of “free association” as one of the two most important contributions made by the giant of psychoanalysis.

It was through devising the new method that Freud was enabled to penetrate into the previously unknown realm of the unconscious proper and to make the profound discovery with which his name is imperishably associated. The devising of this method was one of the

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two great deeds of Freud's scientific life, the other being his self-analysis through which he learned to explore the child's early sexual life, including the famous Oedipus Complex.

In effect Jones believes Freud's greatest single contribution to be free association, since only by use of this technique could he analyze himself, deriving therefrom the famous theories of infantile sexual behavior and the Oedipus Complex.

Jones explains that Freud did not accomplish the initial transition from the cathartic method of therapy to free association by a “lightning-like flash of intuition”; rather it resulted from persistent hard painful progress.

There can be no exact date for the discovery of the ‘free association’ method. All we can say is that it evolved very gradually between 1892 and 1895….

He then described how Freud abandoned hypnosis along with suggestion, pressing and questioning. In 1892, Freud, age thirty-six, utilized on a patient, Elizabeth von Ritter, his newly-evolved “psychical analysis” which he dubbed “concentration.”