Free Association and Dream Analysis: Two Prominent Concepts in Psychotherapy

Psychoanalysis utilizes several techniques, and relies on them in order to determine an individual's unconscious thoughts, and free them through patient insight. One of these techniques is called free association, and is regarded as an essential part of the psychoanalytic therapy process.

Free association is the principle that the patient is to say anything and everything that comes to mind. This includes the de-censoring of one's own speech so that they truly express everything. Over time, the therapist or analyst will draw associations between the many trains of uncensored speech the patient shares each session. This can lead to patient insight into their unconscious thoughts or repressed memories, and the accomplishment of their ultimate goal of "freedom from the oppression of the unconscious" (Trull, 2005).

A second technique is dream analysis, the sort of dream dissection through which analysts can gain clues about a patients unconscious. A patient's dreams are looked at on two levels, the manifest content, and the latent content.

The manifest content of a dream is the actual content of the dream, what actually happened during the dream. In contrast, the latent content of the dream is the symbolic meaning of the content of the dream. In order for an analyst to get to the latent content, they require the patient to discuss the dream's manifest content and encourage free-association about the dream. It then becomes the analysts task to decipher the dream's latent content through both defense mechanisms that may be present in the telling of the dream and in the free association about it. Although a patient is asked to speak freely, it takes time for this sort of speech to occur. Furthermore, there is natural censorship within dreams that will present when telling about the dream, in conjunction with possible reservations or repressions that the individual consciously adds into the dream discussion. Each of the repressions and censors must be overcome, and the analyst will have to look deep into the content of the discussion to get to the bottom of it.

Dreams and free association are important and central techniques in psychoanalysis because they provide a way for an analyst to look inside the words and unconscious images of the patient. This in turn allows for the surfacing of clues and unconscious thoughts and emotions that can help in gaining insight into one's situation. Dreams can also provide hypothesis for which a psychoanalyst to look into in order to help uncover the unconscious thoughts and feelings causing the patient to experience difficulty in life and/or maladjustment.

While there are other central techniques, such as "interpretation," both dreams and free association are extremely important techniques that psychoanalysts make use of in order to get to the bottom of a patient's problems.

**Trull, T. (2005). Clinical Psychology, 7^th Edition. Belmont, CA. Thomson Wadsworth.