The Free-association Rule

In the pub, even sticking to the same subject for more than a few minutes may sometimes be taken as a sign of excessive seriousness. Psychoanalysts use a technique called �free-association’, in which the therapist asks the patient to say whatever comes into his or her mind in association with a particular word or phrase. If you spend some time eavesdropping in pubs, you will notice that English pub-talk often exhibits the same qualities as these free-association sessions, which may help to explain its socially therapeutic effects. In the pub, the normally reserved and cautious English shed some of their inhibitions, and give voice to whatever passing thought happens to occur to them.

The free-association rule states that pub conversations do not have to progress in any kind of logical or orderly manner; they need not stick to the point, nor must they reach a conclusion. When pubgoers are in free-association mode, which is much of the time, attempts to get them to focus on a particular subject for more than a few minutes are fruitless, and only serve to make one unpopular.

The free-association rule allows pub-talk to move in a mysterious way – mostly in apparently random sideways leaps. A comment about the weather somehow triggers a brief argument about football, which prompts a prediction about the fate of a television soap-opera character, which leads to a discussion of a current political scandal, which provokes some banter about the sex-life of the barman, which is interrupted by a regular demanding immediate assistance with a crossword clue, which in turn leads to a comment about the latest health-scare, which somehow turns into a debate about another regular’s broken watch-strap, which sets off a friendly dispute about whose round it is, and so on. You can sometimes see a sort of vague logic in some of the connections, but most topic-shifts are accidental, prompted by participants free-associating with a random word or phrase.

The free-association rule is not just a matter of avoidance of seriousness. It is a licence to deviate from conventional social norms, to let one’s guard down a bit. Among the English, this kind of loose, easy, disordered, haphazard conversation, in which people feel relaxed and comfortable enough to say more or less whatever occurs to them, is only normally found among close friends or family. In the pub, however, I found that free-association talk seems to occur naturally even among people who do not know each other. It is most common among regulars, but at the bar counter, strangers can easily be drawn in to the rambling chat. In any case, it must be understood here that people who regularly frequent the same pub are not necessarily, or even normally, close friends in the usual sense of the term. It is very rare for fellow regulars to invite each other to their homes, for example, even when they have been meeting and sharing their random thoughts every day for many years.

So: the free-association conversation patterns of English pubgoers, even among relative strangers, resemble those of a comfortable, close-knit family – which seems to contradict the usual perception of the English as reserved, stand-offish and inhibited. But when I looked a bit closer, and listened a bit more carefully, the boundaries and restrictions emerged. I discovered that this was yet another example of strictly limited, and closely regulated, cultural remission. The free-association rule allows us to deviate from the normal codes of �public’ conversation, and to enjoy some of the looseness of �private’ or �intimate’ talk – but only up to a point. The clue is in the word �patterns’. The structure of free-association pub-talk is like that of the private conversation among close friends or family, but the content is far more restricted. Even in free-association mode, fellow pubgoers (unless they also happen to be close friends) do not pour their hearts out to each other; they do not reveal – except inadvertently – their private fears or secret desires.

In fact, it is not done to talk about �personal’ matters at all, unless such matters can be aired in a non-serious manner, in accordance with the First Commandment. Jokes about one’s divorce, depression, illness, work problems, delinquent children or other private difficulties and dysfunctions are fine – indeed, wry humour about life’s tragedies is a standard feature of pub-talk. But earnest heart-to-heart outpourings are frowned upon. Such tearful exchanges do take place in pubs, of course, but these are private conversations, between friends or couples or family: it is not considered appropriate to conduct them at the bar counter, and, most importantly, these private conversations are among the few that are not subject to the free-association rule.

Дата добавления: 2015-09-06