free association

The first thing we are going to do to know the term at hand is to discover the etymological origin of the two words that give it its shape:
-Association, in the first place, derives from Latin and is the result of the sum of three components of that language: the prefix “ad-”, which can be translated as “towards”; the noun "socius", which is equivalent to "companion" and the suffix "-cion", which indicates action and effect.
-Free, secondly ”, also comes from Latin, exactly from“ liber ”, which is equivalent to“ free ”.

Is named association to the act and result of associating or associating. The notion is also used to name the organization that groups together different individuals with the same objective and the group of associated people.

Free, for its part, is that or that which has Liberty to act or function: that is, it does not have conditions or restraints.

The concept of free association can be used to refer to entities that arise from the voluntary union of the various members. The Free Association of German Trade Unions and the Free Association of Artists of Spain make up two examples historical records of this type of corporation.

Free association is also a idea used in the field of psychoanalysis from a method that he proposed Sigmund Freud. According to Freud, the technique of psychoanalysis is based on the person attending therapy expressing all his thoughts, emotions, sensations and memories as they appear in his mind, without organization, structuring, selection or restriction. The patient must share with his psychoanalyst even what seems to lack logic or importance or which is immoral.

These free associations reveal, according to the perspective of Freud, contents that are in the unconscious of the individual (who, for that reason, cannot access them). Unconscious representations can thus reflect trauma or psychological disorders.

What free association does is avoid defensive barriers of the subject, eliminating the endurance. Accessing these unconscious contents is the way to cure the patient.

There are those who have come out totally against the use of the tool of free association to treat patients on a psychoanalytic level. And it is that he considers that this brings with it a series of disadvantages, among which they do not hesitate to emphasize the following:
-It is considered that it can shape an absolute environment of ambiguity, which generates confusion.
-It can increase what are paranoid anxieties.
-In the same way, those who are against free association establish that it can even cause dispersion in the patient.

Beyond psychoanalysis, free association is used in the brainstorming (brainstorming) and in the technique from automatic writing promoted by the surrealists.

Within the business and marketing field, the use of the free association tool is used to improve productivity, give cohesion to a team and get the best out of each of its members. It is a technique that exploits creativity by chaotically associating words and ideas without any sort of order or filter.