Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Free association of a stressed out mind



*Click it to Big It*

Ever heard of Free association?
Free association belongs to the psychodynamic family of thinking, thought up by that funny bearded bloke, Freud I think his name was.

I am so glad that I am training to be a counsellor and not a psychologists or even worse a psychiatrist. If I had chosen one of the other disciplines, that would mean learning so much more theory than my over ripe ready to pop brain could take. That is my excuse for just briefly explaining the reason/theory behind the doodle.

Free association is encouraging you to say or write whatever is on your mind at the time.
Its one of the basic techniques of classic psychoanalysis in which the client says everything that comes to mind without editing or censoring. Then its the therapist job to interpret something from this or not. It might just be a load of old random rubbish, it might be something really obvious or there might be something in there that totally surprises you. This is I suppose why it is also called the talking cure.
If I was to use Free Association in a counselling session it would be to encourage a client to talk about/recollect past experiences that may have been painful for them. As the counsellor there wouldn't be much input from me at all, just listening carefully and being aware of the clients body language.
It can have many creative uses as well, from simple brain storming, dream work to revision. In my case I doodled myself and then went with the first word that described how I was feeling at the time. This happened to be 'Tired' and I just went with that till I worked my round to 'Random'. Click on the doodle if you want to see what I wrote more clearly, if you can read my writing that is.

Feel free to ask me about my free associations and maybe try it yourself :)

Another example of free association
A rather cool example of how free association works in the written form.

Free Association the wikipedia definition
This has links to other areas of psychology, but be warned its wikipedia not a well respected scholarly resource.

Well that was my brief introduction into Free Association, it is by no means comprehensive, I just hope I haven't confused anyone.

I am going to be doing a lot more counselling posts once I have finished up with my coursework. It will give me the chance to digest what I have learnt and hopefully you will enjoy reading them.

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