Take Carl Jung’s Word Association Test, a Quick Route Into the Subconscious (1910)

We’ve all, at one time or anoth­er, been asked to say the first thing that pops into our heads in response to a cer­tain word or phrase. It may have hap­pened to us in school, in a mar­ket research group, or per­haps in a job inter­view at a com­pa­ny that regards itself as some­what out­side-the-box. Most such exer­cis­es, and the the­o­ries sup­port­ing their effi­ca­cy as a tool for reveal­ing the speak­er’s inner self, orig­i­nate with the work of the Swiss psy­chi­a­trist-psy­cho­an­a­lyst and then-pro­tégé of Sig­mund Freud Carl Jung.

Jung pub­lished his descrip­tion of this “asso­ci­a­tion method” in the Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Psy­chol­o­gy in 1910, and you can see the sto­ry of its cre­ation — ani­mat­ed in the usu­al Mon­ty Python-esque paper-cutout style — told in the new School of Life video above. In his word-asso­ci­a­tion test, says nar­ra­tor Alain de Bot­ton, “doc­tor and patient were to sit fac­ing one anoth­er, and the doc­tor would read out a list of one hun­dred words. On hear­ing each of these, the patient was to say the first thing that came into their head.” The patient must “try nev­er to delay speak­ing and that they strive to be extreme­ly hon­est in report­ing what­ev­er they were think­ing of, how­ev­er embar­rass­ing, strange, or ran­dom it might seem.”

Tri­al runs con­vinced Jung and his col­leagues that “they had hit upon an extreme­ly sim­ple yet high­ly effec­tive method for reveal­ing parts of the mind that were nor­mal­ly rel­e­gat­ed to the uncon­scious. Patients who in ordi­nary con­ver­sa­tion would make no allu­sions to cer­tain top­ics or con­cerns would, in a word asso­ci­a­tion ses­sion, quick­ly let slip crit­i­cal aspects of their true selves.” The idea is that, under pres­sure to respond as quick­ly and “unthink­ing­ly” as pos­si­ble, the patient would deliv­er up con­tents from the instinct-dri­ven sub­con­scious mind rather than the more delib­er­ate con­scious mind.

Jung used 100 words in par­tic­u­lar to pro­voke these deep-seat­ed reac­tions, the full list of which you can see below. While some of these words may sound fair­ly charged — angry, abuse, dead — most could hard­ly seem more ordi­nary, even innocu­ous: salt, win­dow, head. “When the exper­i­ment is fin­ished I first look over the gen­er­al course of the reac­tion times,” Jung writes in the orig­i­nal paper. “Pro­longed times” mean that “the patient can only adjust him­self with dif­fi­cul­ty, that his psy­cho­log­i­cal func­tions pro­ceed with marked inter­nal fric­tions, with resis­tances.” He found, as de Bot­ton puts it, that “it was pre­cise­ly where there were the longest silences that the deep­est con­flicts and neu­roses lay.” In Jung’s world­view, there were the quick, and there were the neu­rot­ic: a dras­tic sim­pli­fi­ca­tion, to be sure, but as he showed us, some­times the sim­plest lan­guage goes straight to the heart of the mat­ter.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Carl Jung Offers an Intro­duc­tion to His Psy­cho­log­i­cal Thought in a 3‑Hour Inter­view (1957)

How Carl Jung Inspired the Cre­ation of Alco­holics Anony­mous

Carl Jung Explains His Ground­break­ing The­o­ries About Psy­chol­o­gy in a Rare Inter­view (1957)

The Vision­ary Mys­ti­cal Art of Carl Jung: See Illus­trat­ed Pages from The Red Book

Face to Face with Carl Jung: ‘Man Can­not Stand a Mean­ing­less Life’ (1959)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.