The Collaborative International Dictionary
free association \free association\ n. (psychoanalysis) The act or process of free-associating. It is a technique used in psychoanalysis and is supposed to allow the analyst access to the unconscious thoughts of the analysand. See free-associate.
WordNet
n. a thought process in which ideas (words or images) suggest other ideas in a sequence
Wikipedia
Free association may refer to:
- Free association (psychology), a clinical technique of psychoanalysis devised by Sigmund Freud
- Free Association, a musical group formed by David Holmes for the Code 46 soundtrack
- Associated state, a type of political relationship that one country may have with another country
- Freedom of association, a human right
- Free association (communism and anarchism), the society that is the goal of anarchists and communists
- Free Association (newspaper), a publication of the Japanese Anarchist Federation
es:Asociación libre
Free association is a technique used in psychoanalysis (and also in psychodynamic theory) which was originally devised by Sigmund Freud out of the hypnotic method of his mentor and coworker, Josef Breuer.
'The importance of free association is that the patients spoke for themselves, rather than repeating the ideas of the analyst; they work through their own material, rather than parroting another's suggestions'.
Free association (also called free association of producers or, as Marx often called it, a community of freely associated individuals) is a relationship among individuals where there is no state, social class or authority, and private property of means of production. Once private property is abolished, individuals are no longer deprived of access to means of production enabling them to freely associate (without social constraint) to produce and reproduce their own conditions of existence and fulfill their individual and creative needs and desires. The term is used by anarchists and Marxists and is often considered a defining feature of a fully developed communist society.
The concept of free association, however, becomes more clear around the concept of the proletariat. The proletarian is someone who has no property nor any means of production and, therefore, to survive, sells the only thing that they have, their abilities (the labour power), to those owning the means of production. The existence of individuals deprived of property, deprived of livelihood, allows owners (or capitalists) to find in the market an object of consumption that thinks and acts (human abilities), which they use in order to accumulate increasing capital in exchange for the wage that maintains the survival of the proletarians. The relationship between proletarians and owners of the means of production is thereby a forced association in which the proletarian is only free to sell his labor power, in order to survive. By selling his productive capacity in exchange for the wage which ensures survival, the proletarian puts his practical activity under the will of the buyer (the owner), becoming alienated from his/her own actions and products, in a relationship of domination and exploitation. Free association would be the form of society created if private property was abolished in order to allow individuals to freely dispose of the means of production, which would bring about an end to class society, i.e. there would be no more owners neither proletarians, nor state, but only freely associated individuals.
The abolition of private property by a free association of producers is the original goal of the communists and anarchists: it is identified with anarchy and Communism itself. However, the evolution of various trends have led some to virtually abandon the goal or to put it in the background in face of other tasks, while others believe free association should guide all challenges to the status quo.
Usage examples of "free association".
Could the faker keep up free association if nudged gently onto dangerous territory?
The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the right to free expression and free association.
I opened a book at random and set up free association, beginning with whatever I first saw.
All the masses of the great work-civil code, university, Concordat, prefectoral and centralized administration-all the details of its arrangement and distribution of places, tend to one general effect, which is the omnipotence of the State, the omnipresence of the government, the abolition of local and private initiative, the suppression of voluntary free association, the gradual dispersion of small spontaneous groupings, the preventive ban of prolonged hereditary works, the extinction of sentiments by which the individual lives beyond himself in the past or in the future.
When I chase them using free association, all that comes to mind is a vast row of silent figures .