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Freud praised Jung for providing experimental proof of the existence of the unconscious, welcoming him in the early
psychoanalytic movement as a much needed hard-nosed scientist. Although the term complex was used by Freud and Josef
Breuer (/people/medicine/psychology-and-psychiatry-biographies/josef-breuer) earlier, it was with Jung's meaning that it
nally entered the psychoanalytic vocabulary.

Jung and his associates applied the Word Association Test to many psychiatric contexts, including forensic diagnoses,
publishing some remarkable cases of successful detection. A much-neglected facet of Jung's early work is his application of this
method to families. He gave the test to members of the same families and found that there were psychological subgroupings in
the same family. At the time, however, Jung possessed neither the theoretical understanding nor the clinical experience to take
these ndings further. One can argue that these un nished questions contributed to the development of his theories about
other manifestations of shared unconscious structures in subjects, for example, the archetypes (Papadopoulos, 1996).

Gradually, Jung abandoned this method and the whole experimental approach to psychiatry, especially after leaving the
Burghölzli Psychiatric Clinic.

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Nonetheless, his method of ampli cation (instead of free association) and his sensitivity to the role of language in
psychotherapy owe their origin to the Word Association Test. As of 2005, the Word Association Test is hardly used, though it is
taught in some Jungian training programs and some analysts use it as a technique to enhance the therapeutic process (Hill,
1975).

Renos K. Papadopoulos

See also: Ampli cation (analytical psychology).

Bibliography

Hill, John. (1975). Individuation and the association experiment. Annual of Archetypal Psychology, 145-151.

Jung, Carl Gustav. (1917/1926/1943). The psychology of the unconscious processes. In Coll. Works, Vol.7: Two essays on
analytical psychology (R. F. Hull, Trans.). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953.

Papadopoulos, Renos K. (1996). Archetypal family therapy: Developing a Jungian approach to working with families. In Laura S.
Dodson and Terrill L. Gibson (Eds.), Psyche and family: Jungian applications to family therapy. Wilmette, IL: Chiron Press.

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 Word Association Test

Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology ×
COPYRIGHT 2001 The Gale Group Inc.
Word association test

A procedure for investigating how word meanings are stored in memory.

In a word association test, the researcher presents a series of words to individual respondents. For each word, participants are
instructed to respond with the rst word (i.e., associate) that comes to mind. Freud believed that such responses provided clues
to peoples' personalities (free association ). Cognitive psychologists, however, use this procedure to investigate how semantic
information is stored in memory . Studies have demonstrated that word associations are almost always based on a word's
meaning, as opposed to its physical properties. For example, a typical response to the word KNIFE might be FORK or perhaps
SPOON, but not WIFE or LIFE.

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Over the years, psychologists have collected word association norms that describe the relative frequencies with which various
responses are given to different words. These frequencies are then used as a measure of the associative strength between the
words. If 90% of a large sample of people give the word DOCTOR as a response to the word NURSE, this percentage (90) is
used as an index of the associative connection between DOCTOR and NURSE. Another way of determining the strength of an
association is to measure how much time it takes to produce a response in a word association test. High frequency associates
are also the ones with the fastest reaction times.

By comparing children's word associations to those of adults, we can learn something about how word meanings are acquired.
Five year-olds are likely to respond to the word LONG with a response like GRASS—indicating that words are organized in their
memory according to real world situations and personal experience.

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By age 10, the most common response is SHORT, thereby revealing a growing awareness of linguistic relations and
grammatical categories.

See also Free association

Timothy E. Moore

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 Word Association Test

A Dictionary of Sociology ×
© A Dictionary of Sociology 1998, originally published by Oxford University Press 1998.
Word Association Test See PROJECTIVE TESTS (/social-sciences/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-
releases/projective-tests).

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