How Free Association Lets You Be Your Most Authentic Self in Therapy

If you’re looking to go a little deeper in therapy—or if you simply want to learn a bit more about a popular therapy technique—you might want to try free association (aka the therapist-approved version of word vomit).

Free association is pretty much just what it sounds like. It’s a technique where you let yourself spill whichever thoughts pop into your head, without censoring yourself. No worries, though. It’s done in the safe space of your therapist’s office, and you’ll be given support and guidance along the way.

Where Did the Concept of Free Association Come From?

Free association is most commonly associated with Sigmund Freud, but it emerged as a concept before Freud, during the 18th century in the work of Franz-Anton Mesmer, an Austrian physician often credited with coming up with the concept of hypnosis. By the time Freud was working with the idea of free association, he was considering it as a means to help people get in touch with their repressed memories and feelings.

That mental image many of us have of therapy—where a patient is lying down on a couch and just talking, saying whatever comes into their mind? That’s basically free association, as conceptualized by Sigmund Freud.

Even beyond Freud and his contemporaries, modern psychoanalysts and therapists still use elements of free association in their practices, though it may not look the same as it did back when Freud used it.

“While free association is rooted in Freudian psychoanalysis, it has been adapted and used in many forms of modern therapy, including psychodynamic therapy and certain types of cognitive behavioral therapy,” says Kalley Hartman, LMFT, licensed marriage and family therapist at Ocean Recovery. “It’s often used in conjunction with other techniques to help patients explore their thoughts and feelings and gain insight into their behaviors.”

How Do You Use Free Association in Therapy?

So what exactly is free association? Hartman describes it as when your therapist encourages you to “freely share thoughts, words, and anything else that comes to mind, irrespective of how random or disconnected these thoughts may seem.”

But while free association may seem pretty random in nature, it actually has a clear purpose. “The process aims to uncover hidden thoughts and feelings that might be causing distress, helping the therapist and patient understand unconscious patterns,” Hartman explains.

Jessica Good, MA, LPC, EMDR therapist and owner of Good EMDR Therapy LLC, says that free association is used often in eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, a type of therapy that uses specific eye movement to help people process and heal from trauma.

“I practice EMDR therapy, which has some components of free association,” Good explains. “When reprocessing with EMDR, the brain is making connections to other times in which clients felt a similar way.” Good says that processing and making these connections allow for “greater insights, breaking through ‘stuck points,’ and relief from distress as the client gains increased contextual awareness.”

This Is Why Free Association Can Be So Helpful in a Therapy Session

Alright, so free association sounds like a cool concept, but is it actually helpful?

Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of free association, with insights from therapists and research.

It Can Help You Make Connections Between Your Thoughts and Behaviors

When done with intention and therapist support, free association can help you discover connections between various thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and behaviors you experience, says Good.

“It surprises many people, but when we pull back the veil on their life there is typically an intricate web of connected negative beliefs and ingrained neural pathways leading to how they feel, think, and behave on a daily basis,” Good says.

It Can Build Trust Between You and Your Therapist

Trust is super important in therapy. Without it, it'll be hard—almost impossible—to open up.

With that said, using free association in therapy not only encourages your own self-exploration but can also deepen the work you are doing in therapy, leading to important insights. As such, it helps “foster an open dialogue between the therapist and the patient,” Good explains. In turn, she says, this can help deepen the therapeutic relationship, increasing trust between you and your therapist.

It Helps You Tune Out the All of That Mental Chatter in Your Brain

According to a 2020 study published in Frontiers in Psychology, one of the purposes of free association is to tune out the environment around you and go deeper inside your unconscious.

The researchers say that free association allows for you to get in touch with your “intrapsychic reality,” which refers to your psyche, or inner emotional world.

It Can Help You Process and Heal From Trauma

As you begin to let your thoughts flow, you might find yourself entering a dreamlike state. As such, you may be able to uncover repressed memories, some of which may be traumatic.

Uncovering traumatic memories can be painful, but when done in a safe space and with a therapist you trust, it can be an important first step in healing from trauma.

What Our Experts Had to Say About Free Association (Plus Examples)

Although the therapists Verywell Mind spoke to couldn’t give very specific examples due to privacy issues, they were able to share some general observations from their therapy practices.

Re-Evaluating Childhood Memories

Good says that she uses free association all the time as part of her work as an EMDR therapist.

“Basically my entire caseload would be considered case studies,” she says. “I will say that people are very surprised when they notice that something they thought only affected them in the present moment goes back to childhood or earlier life.”

One example would be a person who's working on processing their feelings toward their abusive parent, Good says. Through free association, they realize that they have negative feelings about the parent they thought was the “good parent”—the parent who enabled the abusive behavior.

Unresolved Grief

Hartman shared the case of a patient who was dealing with unresolved grief. “Through free association, they began to talk about seemingly unrelated topics like gardens, which eventually led to memories of gardening with a deceased loved one,” she described. “This helped the patient realize their unresolved feelings of loss and begin the healing process.”