Take Carl Jung’s Phrase Affiliation Check, a Fast Route Into the Unconscious (1910)

We’ve all, at one time or one other, been requested to say the very first thing that pops into our heads in response to a sure phrase or phrase. It might have occurred to us at school, in a market analysis group, or maybe in a job interview at an organization that regards itself as considerably outside-the-box. Most such workout routines, and the theories supporting their efficacy as a software for revealing the speaker’s inside self, originate with the work of the Swiss psychiatrist-psychoanalyst and then-protégé of Sigmund Freud Carl Jung.

Jung printed his description of this “affiliation technique” within the American Journal of Psychology in 1910, and you’ll see the story of its creation — animated within the typical Monty Python-esque paper-cutout model — instructed in the brand new College of Life video above. In his word-association check, says narrator Alain de Botton, “physician and affected person had been to take a seat dealing with each other, and the physician would learn out a listing of 100 phrases. On listening to every of those, the affected person was to say the very first thing that got here into their head.” The affected person should “attempt by no means to delay talking and that they try to be extraordinarily trustworthy in reporting no matter they had been pondering of, nevertheless embarrassing, unusual, or random it might sound.”

Trial runs satisfied Jung and his colleagues that “they’d come across an very simple but extremely efficient technique for revealing elements of the thoughts that had been usually relegated to the unconscious. Sufferers who in peculiar dialog would make no allusions to sure matters or issues would, in a phrase affiliation session, shortly let slip important points of their true selves.” The thought is that, beneath strain to reply as shortly and “unthinkingly” as doable, the affected person would ship up contents from the instinct-driven unconscious thoughts somewhat than the extra deliberate acutely aware thoughts.

Jung used 100 phrases particularly to impress these deep-seated reactions, the total listing of which you’ll see beneath. Whereas a few of these phrases could sound pretty charged — indignant, abuse, useless — most might hardly appear extra peculiar, even innocuous: salt, window, head. “When the experiment is completed I first look over the final course of the response occasions,” Jung writes within the authentic paper. “Extended occasions” imply that “the affected person can solely alter himself with problem, that his psychological features proceed with marked inside frictions, with resistances.” He discovered, as de Botton places it, that “it was exactly the place there have been the longest silences that the deepest conflicts and neuroses lay.” In Jung’s worldview, there have been the short, and there have been the neurotic: a drastic simplification, to make certain, however as he confirmed us, generally the best language goes straight to the guts of the matter.

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The Visionary Mystical Artwork of Carl Jung: See Illustrated Pages from The Crimson E-book

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Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and tradition. His tasks embody the Substack publication Books on Cities, the guide The Stateless Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video sequence The Metropolis in Cinema. Comply with him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Fb.