Wandering Attention and the Method of Free Association
When using the method of free association, a psychoanalyst asks the patient to speak freely about anything that comes to mind, no matter how absurd or inappropriate those thoughts may seem. The length of psychoanalysis is largely determined by working with free associations: it takes time for a person to feel that their unconscious is safe and to let go of control—only then does the technique become especially effective.
Another important aspect is the psychoanalyst’s own state during the session. As Annie Roux, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, titular member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, writes:
What the analyst hears is not what they think they will hear. Likewise, the patient does not say what they think they will say. The analyst, “without memory or desire,” following Bion’s recommendation, makes it possible for a dialogue to develop in which the patient’s formless and disordered material is given meaning. As a result of these wanderings, unconscious motives suddenly appear and a certain direction is revealed.
The psychoanalyst refrains from directing the process, relaxes, and thereby helps the patient to relax and defocus (deconcentrate) their attention. To wander is to act without a goal. This technique is clearly similar to hypnosis, where the hypnotherapist also enters a light trance to establish rapport. The psychoanalyst’s goal at this moment is to connect with the person’s unconscious, so both enter a state of wandering attention.
Forgetting the goal means letting go of rationality. This is not an easy trick, especially when you’re paying a significant amount for psychotherapy and expecting concrete results. But both the client and the psychologist need to forget about this for a while and get lost in a defocused state. This is the beauty and wisdom of psychoanalysis: the approach allows you to bypass the structuring rational ego and slip between psychological defenses to reach awareness of what is hidden and lost in the irrational.
The Neurobiology of Repression
Neurobiology offers a neural network model for how information is retrieved from memory. When recalling, entire ensembles of neurons carrying various related information are activated. Information encoded by a large number of neural connections is statistically easier to remember. If associations with elements are long-term rather than short-term, recall is more successful.
We must assume that what is repressed from consciousness is unlikely to have many associations with current experience. In everyday consciousness, a person focuses on familiar things. By repressing mental material, a person avoids its intrusion into consciousness and its connection with what is happening in the present. Therefore, recalling repressed material requires more time and effort. Repression is a psychological defense mechanism that makes it harder for a person to become aware of their own mind’s contents. It may seem that repression is purely a psychoanalytic term with no relevance to modern science, but that’s not the case.
Remember Benjamin Libet, who became world-famous for experiments that questioned the existence of free will? The evidence was a delay between brain activity related to an action and the decision to make a movement—the “readiness potential” arises in the motor cortex before a person decides to perform a motor act (in other words, the brain seems to “know” about the decision before the person does). Libet’s conclusions have been widely debated and criticized, but the fact of the delay remains.
In another experiment, Libet found that the delay increased if psychological tests showed signs of repression in the subject. The delay between brain activity and awareness grew longer. It’s interesting to ask: are there mental processes that reduce this delay? And could the psychotherapeutic effect of altered states of consciousness be precisely the reduction of the delay in information transfer between the subconscious and consciousness?
There is a lot of evidence that stimuli presented within the same event have stronger associations in long-term memory than stimuli from different events. For example, a group of scientists found that neural activity for pairs of stimuli from the same event is more similar than for pairs from different events. Moreover, activity in mnemonic areas of the brain (such as the hippocampus) is higher when retrieving elements from another, rather than the current, event, since searching for information unrelated to the present is a more labor-intensive process.
Based on this, we can assume that a patient in a psychotherapy session will not be able to recall a repressed memory if they are focused on the context of the current situation. To activate other neural ensembles, it is necessary to detach from the present moment—this allows less significant elements of experience to come into play and increases the likelihood of recalling other events.
It’s likely that “difficult” memories cannot be accessed through ordinary rational effort. One must take the person’s attention out of their current context—in essence, alter their state of consciousness. This may require more time and effort, but the method of free association can speed up the process. The current context shifts thanks to aimless wandering of the mind during searching and self-absorption, as in meditation and other altered states of consciousness. This increases the chance of activating different neural ensembles and accessing memory layers not involved in forming the person’s current state.
However, the method has its limitations. According to proponents of cognitive therapy, free association is not suitable for patients with depression, as they may “sink even deeper into the swamp of their negative thoughts.” But you can look at it another way: if a person’s everyday state of consciousness is shaped by constantly activated “depressive” experience, then under certain conditions, the method of free association could help uncover other, more positive experiences.