Free association (n.) is a state like falling asleep, except that the involuntary ideas keep their character as ideas instead of turning into images — the involuntary becomes voluntary.
Free association (n.) is never free: drop the purposes you know, and unknown purposes take charge of the drift.
Free association (n.) unlocks the symptom with the very ideas that 'interfere with our reflection' and that criticism dismisses as worthless rubbish.
Free association (n.) begins with one tiny step: ask the speaker why he slipped, and take the first thing that occurs to him.
Free association (n.) is an attitude of attention quite different from reflection, one that shuts reflection out — easy for some, incredibly clumsy for others.
Free association (n.) has one rule: say whatever comes, with no criticism and no silence for shame or for seeming unimportance.
Free association (n.) lets the patient choose the day's subject, starting from whatever surface his unconscious happens to offer.
Free association (n.) is a thread of remote, distorted derivatives of the repressed, spun until a thought comes so close that the patient must repress again.
Free association (n.) follows one rule of order: whatever comes into the patient's head first is dealt with first, even if it interrupts a half-read dream.
Free association (n.) is the traveller at the train window describing the passing view to someone inside the carriage who cannot see it.
Free association (n.) must allow no exceptions: grant asylum at one spot in a town and all the riff-raff gathers there.
Free association (n.) is ore: the patient throws it away as worthless, and the analyst extracts the precious metal from it.
Free association (n.) was anticipated by Garth Wilkinson's exalted laissez-faire, which Havelock Ellis took as proof Freud's method was an artist's.
Free association (n.) is not free at all: set conscious purpose aside and the "free" ideas turn out to be steered by unconscious material.