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Freud credits especially Sándor Ferenczi for reminding him about Börne’s essay. Only upon re-reading it, Freud realized that he had read it when he had been 14 years old. Freud goes on writing about himself in the third person: “…he realized that he had owned that essay 50 years ago, along with other works by Borne in a volume given to him when he was 14 years old, and that he was the first author whose essays he had delved into. And he was astonished to find expressed in Börne's advice some of the views he himself had always cherished and vindicated”. [Freud, 1920 , p.265]. On numerous occasions, Freud (1900, 1925) references poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller’ s description of the ‘relaxation of the watch‘ (Schiller’s correspondence with Körner 1788, in: Freud 1900, p. 103) as also relevant to free association technique. According to Strachey, the first mention of one of the theoretical roots of a concept akin to free association in Freud's writings can be found in this paragraph from "The Project." “There are obviously other kinds of thought-process which, instead of the disinterested aim of cognition, have another, practical, aim in view. The state of expectation, which was the starting-point of all thought [p. 361), is an example of this second kind of thought. Here a wishful cathexis is firmly retained, while alongside of it a second, perceptual, cathexis which emerges is followed with attention”. (1895a, p. 376). In turn, Freud’s method of free association may have been indirectly impactful in later formulations of gestalt or systems theories of cognitive processes, e.g. Thomä and Kächele hypothesize that “Since [psychoanalytic] therapy consists of integrating the parts into a whole, connecting the elements like the pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, the gestalt psychological principles set forth by Bernfeld (1934) were implicated from the very beginning [of Freud’s conceptualization of free associative processes]…” (Thomä, Kächele, 1987, p. 224). II. B. SIGMUND FREUD According to Ernest Jones, the discovery of the method of Free Association “ was one of the two great deeds of Freud's scientific life, the other being his self-analysis through which he learned to explore the child's early sexual life, including the famous Oedipus complex.” (Jones, 1972, p. 265). Zvi Lothane proposes that the evolution of the concept took place in four distinct periods: (a) the pre-psychoanalytic, spanning from 1888 to 1892; (b) 1893–1895, marked by Freud's contributions to the Studies on Hysteria; (c) 1900 characterized by its pivotal role in “The Interpretation of Dreams;” and (d) the period from 1912 to 1915, where it features prominently in Freud's papers on technique (Lothane, 2018). Beyond the above direct and indirect influences, Sigmund Freud gradually developed the procedure of free association in his own work as fundamental to psychoanalytic technique. He did so along two lines: 1. In his clinical work with patients, in relation to his discovery and
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