Advanced Psychoanalysis

During a rare lull in activity in the office, it was decided that everyone should be psycho-analysed, using the famous word association test. Ten innocuous words were read one by one to the subject who had to respond spontaneously with the first word that came to mind. The results were startling and scandalous as I will now explain. Here are the words we used -

1. apple
2. taxi
3. cream
4. beach
5. dentist
6. numbers
7. woman
8. purple
9. dolphin
10. fog

Firstly, several subjects hesitated for a long time before responding in relation to "woman", and one even failed to respond at all. This block in expression likely indicated a feeling of discomfort with their answer, perhaps feeling it was inappropriate and so an attempt was made to find an acceptable answer.

Interestingly, "dolphin" also triggered similar reactions in some subjects, perhaps the word having special meaning.

The real scandal started when we began to use real people's name as the trigger words. This provoked several candid responses that caught everyone involved by surprise. I will explain more later...