How to Practice Free Association

1. Recognize The Introduction As Spiraling Into Free Association (as if you hadn't guessed)
That form of free association might be more specifically characterized as "stream of consciousness". There's even at least one Freudian slip in there that's obvious to me and that I almost edited out but then I caught myself trying to tamper. Toward the end I wrote "story" when really some lady allegedly called an acquaintance of mine a blonde baboon (he had long bleachy hair and was a big guy heavy metal fan) at a store. But alas, I wasn't at the store that night and have only heard the tale of over-aged group adolescent behavior second hand. So there's a certain amount of guilt in retelling a tale as if one were there, and so I guess I admitted it as a half-truth by typing "story" rather than "store". Another typo or Freudian slip I found well after the fact was that I typed "stay" when I ostensibly intended to type "say" (near Plato). Could be something to do with Plato's emphasis on the static Forms that stay put. Please see my article "How to Catch a Freudian Slip", linked under "Resources".

2. Grasp the Theory Behind Free Association
The basic idea from Freud is that if you encourage the client (back then more likely called a "patient") to just spout whatever comes to his/her mind, eventually nuggets of important and hitherto repressed material will be bumped into along the web of associations.

3. Play Word Association Games
The generic way of playing a word association game is at a party or on a road-trip to start with a word and go 'round the circle of friends and enemies and each person says the first word that comes to mind that is usually triggered as a result of the last word spoken (however loosely it may be related). There's also Taboo, which apparently is a word association game though I've never played it. Many of you have likely seen word association played on online forums in which entire threads are devoted to games, and the forums can be as diverse as Disney to USCHO.com.

4. Interpret It!
Once you've done some free association either with yourself or with friends, try to interpret what it all means! There are at least a couple of theories about interpretation of these sorts of things, including dreams. One would be that similar images or words often mean the same things to different people within a culture, or even across cultures. The idea that I prefer a little bit more is that each person's images and word associations are more individualized than all that, and that ultimately the person producing associations is the best interpreter of his/her own productions but may need some spurring by others to break possible resistances.