THE ASSOCIATIONS OF NORMAL SUBJECTS

by C. G. Jung and Franz Riklin

1 For some time past, attention has been paid in this clinic to the process of association. In order to produce scientifically useful material for this, my director, Professor Bleuler, has compiled a list of 156 stimulus-words and experimented with them on all types of psychosis. In these experiments a very considerable difficulty soon presented itself. There existed no means of precisely and quantitatively separating association in abnormal subjects from that in normal ones. No work had been done giving any facts on the range of normal subjects and formulating the apparently chaotic coincidences of association into rules. In order to fill this gap to some extent and thereby to pave the way for experiments on pathological associations, I decided to collect more material on association in normal people and at the same time to study the principal conditions involved. I carried out this plan with my colleague, Dr. Riklin.

2 The main experimental methods are as follows: Initially we collected associations from a large number of normal people, with the intention, first, of examining the reactions to see whether they are at all subject to any law; and, next, of discovering whether individual patterns occur, i.e., whether any definite reaction-types are to be found. We combined with this a second experiment of a general psychological nature.

3 The mechanism of association is an extraordinarily fleeting and variable psychic process; it is subject to countless psychic events, which cannot be objectively established. Among the psychic factors that exert the main influence on the mechanism of association, attention is of cardinal importance. It is the factor that in the first place directs and modifies the process of association; it is also both the psychic factor that can most easily be subjected to experiment and the delicate affective apparatus that reacts first in abnormal physical and mental conditions and thereby modifies the associative performance.

4 Attention is that infinitely complicated mechanism which by countless threads links the associative process with all other phenomena of the psychic and physical domain in consciousness. If we know the effects of attention on the process of association, then we also know, at least in general, the corresponding effects of every psychic event that attention is capable of affecting.

5 These considerations led us to investigate the effects of attention on the process of association, hoping to clarify as precisely as possible the following questions:

1. What are the laws governing the range of association in normal subjects?

2. What are the direct effects of attention on the association process? In particular, does the valency of the association decrease with the distance from the focus of consciousness?

6 Our experiments have revealed a series of facts that not only encourage us to follow the paths on which we have set out into psychological regions but also, as we believe, fit us to do so.

C. G. JUNG

Part One

I. GENERAL EXPERIMENTAL PROCEDURE

7 The experiments were carried out alternately by the two authors so that each one in turn undertook a series of experiments on the subjects concerned. Altogether thirty-eight people took part: nine educated men, fourteen educated women, seven uneducated men, and eight uneducated women; the age-bracket was 20–50 years. Care was taken to use, as far as possible, normal subjects for the experiment. This, however, led to unexpected difficulties, particularly with the educated subjects, as precisely on this level the concept of normality must be very elastic. Nevertheless we hope we have not deviated too far from the norm in our selection of subjects for experiment. We give the numbers of the subjects in detail and in many cases combine with this a short description of the personality, which will facilitate the understanding of possible anomalies. Naturally the two authors have also carried out the experiment on each other.

8 In noting associations we have entirely limited ourselves to those produced by calling out stimulus-words. We used altogether four hundred different stimulus-words. These, grammatically classified, are as follows:

nouns 231
adjectives 69
verbs 82
adverbs and numerals 18

9 The number of syllables was not taken into account (the stimulus-words have one, two, or three syllables). Nor were the stimulus-words arranged in definite categories as Sommer, for instance, has arranged them. On the contrary, as much care as possible was taken to see that stimulus-words of similar forms or meaning should not follow each other, so as to avoid the subject adapting to a particular topic after one or two reactions. Through an unfortunate coincidence it happened that among the first hundred stimulus-words there were about thirty that can easily be associated according to temporal or spatial co-existence; in the second hundred there are only about twenty of these, which caused a notable difference of the co-existence association in the first and second hundred. The shortage of stimulus-words of this kind is made up by verbs. It was considered important completely to exclude difficult and rare words, in order to prevent mistakes or lengthened reaction-time due to lack of knowledge on the part of the subjects. The stimulus-words were therefore taken as far as possible from everyday life.

10 This consideration was all the more essential for us, as with most of our subjects we had to work under somewhat abnormal linguistic conditions. In German-speaking Switzerland the vernacular consists, as is well known, of the Swiss-German dialect or dialects, which not only deviate considerably from standard German but also show...