Harnessing the Power of Mental Association to Get Deeper

How association works: it’s about the brain!

Elizabeth: At the end of our last post, you said, “the most readily accessible path” to getting deeper, in the psychological sense, is via “the process of association.” 

Barbara: That’s because all you need in order to engage the process is your own mind. First, you consciously shift to a … mind-wandering state. You allow your thoughts and feelings to go where they will — the mindfulness that we’ve talked about. You try to free yourself from constraints. And then, you watch the associations that arise. 

Quieting the inner censor facilitates creative thinking. Consider the state of dreaming, during which the “censor” is shut down, allowing entirely unrealistic images and ideas to populate your mind. Over the centuries, people have used other methods to achieve diminished censoring while awake, including alcohol, opioids, and psychedelics. Those approaches decrease inhibition, which is the goal. 

Elizabeth: I’m confused. If I’m just letting my mind wander, why would the associations I might need in order to get deeper into my subject come to the surface? Don’t you have to frame a kind of mental environment? Why wouldn’t your associations go all over the place and not in the direction you want them to go?

Barbara: They would seem to “go all over the place.” And that is just what you want. If your aim is to get beyond the way you’ve always conceptualized the subject, then you want to free your mind to deliver new ideas. 

When you stop to take a break from a project — to meditate or take a walk or do the laundry — the project may leave your attention, but it doesn’t leave your mind. And when you’re in a daydreaming state, if you’ve been working hard on the project, the associations that arise are likely to be connected to it.

Elizabeth: Now that you say it, it seems so obvious. While you’re trying to create something, each association is linked to the one before it and after it, so they’ll all connected to your subject in one way or another. 

Barbara: Associations harness the fact that your brain links related aspects of different experiences; it generalizes; it conceptualizes. This is not something you guide or make happen. It’s going on all the time. It’s how experience is “mapped” in your brain’s “circuitry.” Your aim is to “lift the censor.” Then you can turn your attention to questioning the possible meanings of what arises.

conceptual illustration of neuron cells: shutterstock/whitehouse

Why don’t you describe the chain of associations in your Instagram post about the sweater, which we’ve been using as an example. Can you reconstruct how you got from a romantic memory of adventure with your German boyfriend to what you realized was a turning point in your life?

Elizabeth: I started with my longtime association to the sweater, a beautiful, madcap trip down a mountain. Then, another beautiful image came to mind: the garden in Nuremberg and its lovely hostess, who, like everyone else, was speaking German, a language I didn’t know. This led to my recalling a strong sense of discomfort. But it wasn’t just a memory. I became aware of my heart pumping, in the present. 

And that sense led to the realization that I felt hostility toward the society people in the garden, who’d lived through the war, as non-Jews, doing who knows what. They were the age of my jewish parents who, had they been in Germany, would have been trying to escape with their lives. And that thought led to the vision of the elastic, umbilical connection to my parents that I’d been stretching to the breaking point. And finally to the realization that the thrilling sense of freedom on the mountain had been a fantasy.

Barbara: It's only in retrospect that you see the clear narrative line. While you were writing, you were just putting "one foot in front of the other." You didn't know where it was going to lead. And perhaps there were other associations that you ignored along the way....

Elizabeth: I stayed on the path I did because I sensed the point of the story emerging. Disparate thoughts/feelings seemed to be converging — exhilarating freedom and its opposite. Only after I finished the story did I realize that I’d been traveling around Germany with my boyfriend for at least a week and had repressed all thoughts of the Holocaust. In fact, in all the years since, I never associated the Holocaust with the sweater, which I preferred to keep wrapped up in an exclusively happy memory. 

Barbara: What other images came to you along the way that you didn’t dig into?

Elizabeth: I remember several. One was of an inn in the Alps where we had to stay, when it got dark and there were no other options. It was an ancient building, freezing cold, and the old innkeepers were unpleasant and somehow grotesque. They seemed titillated by us, and I didn’t like it. They were like gnomes in a fairy tale. 

Barbara: Like in a Grimm’s fairy tale, in which children get eaten? It sounds to me like this association, had you explored it, might also have alerted you to the fact that there were creepy things about this romantic adventure.

Elizabeth: But the inn memory seemed closed, a dead end, whereas the garden had something murky and confusing about it, something at odds with the beautiful scene and potent. 

Barbara: These are the kinds of feelings that someone might want to run from. But, for you, they’re a mystery to be solved. They mark where there’s buried treasure.  

Perhaps you were getting hints all along that there was something “grim” under the romantic surface, and then this image of the garden arrived, attached to the kind of negative sensation you look out for. Or perhaps it wasn’t just the beauty of the trip down the mountain but also the creepiness of the inn that linked to the garden and its underlying threat. Whichever it was, you recognized it as a clue. 

Elizabeth: That’s my writing process. I pay attention to fleeting clues, and there are several I’ve come to depend on: 

The sense that something is not quite right, that an explanation I’ve been accepting doesn’t quite add up.

The feeling that I do not want to follow where a certain thought is taking me, which opens the question of what I’m afraid of.

A physical feeling like my heart pumping, my face getting hot, a tightening in my chest. Besides being a clue, feelings like that confirm that what I’m onto is true.

Barbara: We shouldn’t suggest that these are the only clues to follow. And we shouldn’t make it sound like following associations is easy. Getting deeper is not simply an automatic process of paying attention to what comes to mind. You also have to develop a sense of which associations to follow. You have to be intrepid and determined. Self-reflection, non-defensiveness, and interpretive thinking are important to cultivate in yourself. It takes hard work and practice. But this is something you can learn. 

Deeper is hard because…well, something is deeper for a reason. For instance, you didn’t have to pay attention to the image of the garden that came to mind. You had preferred to keep your trip “wrapped in a happy memory,” and you kept it wrapped up your whole adult life! You didn’t want to remember your discomfort in the garden. But you went there anyway. Overcoming your own resistance is a rich topic, and we should return to it later. 

Meanwhile, let’s summarize: All your associations tell you something about yourself, through the connections you make and their meanings to you. Or why would you have thought of them? The goal is to trust that whatever comes to mind is data about your mental processes. And be prepared: where your train of thoughts leads may be a total surprise. 

Elizabeth: I’d love to follow up on that idea next time — with a personal story.