The Morning Pages are Julia Cameron's well known technique of writing three pages of spontaneous writing.

I have wondered for some time as to the origins of this content.

I assert that I have found the origin, and that the original concept played a key role in the creation of Freud's 'Free association', the backbone of the entire field of psychology.

As it is well known, all of Jung's work into the collective and unconsciousness are based of Freud's work.

This is to say that the original source of this technique was responsible for the entire psychoanalytic theory, the entirety of the science we call Psychology today.

Free Association

From Wikipedia,

"Free association is the expression (as by speaking or writing) of the content of consciousness without censorship as an aid in gaining access to unconscious processes. The technique is used in psychoanalysis (and also in psychodynamic theory) which was originally devised by Sigmund Freud out of the hypnotic method of his mentor and colleague, Josef Breuer.

Freud described it as such: "The importance of free association is that the patients spoke for themselves, rather than repeating the ideas of the analyst; they work through their own material, rather than parroting another's suggestions."

Origins

"Freud would later also mention as a possible influence an essay by Ludwig Börne, suggesting that to foster creativity you "write down, without any falsification or hypocrisy, everything that comes into your head". "

Ludwig Börne:

"Ernest Jones in his first volume of Sigmund Freud's biography relates that "Böeme" was an especial favorite in Freud's adolescence, a half century later quoting many passages from the essay "The Art of Becoming an Original Writer", which clearly played a part in Freud's putting his trust in free association during psycho-analysis:"

"Here follows the practical prescription I promised. Take a few sheets of paper and for three days in succession write down, without any falsification or hypocrisy, everything that comes into your head. Write what you think of yourself, of your women, of the Turkish War, of Goethe... of the last judgment, of those senior to you in authority – and when the three days are over you will be amazed at what novel and startling thoughts have welled up in you. That is the art of becoming an original writer in three days."

How to Become an Original Writer in Three Days

Harvard Review - TRANSLATED BY LELAND DE LA DURANTAYE

"There can be found today men and works which offer instruction in how to learn such things as Latin, Greek, and French in a mere three days, and such things as accounting in a mere three hours. How one might become in three days a truly original writer has, however, yet to be indicated. And yet it is such a simple thing! To do it there is nothing one needs to learn, only much one needs to unlearn. There is nothing new one need to experience, only much that one need forget.

In today’s world, the minds and works of the learned might be compared to ancient manuscripts where one must scrape away the boring disputes of would-be Church Fathers and the ranting of inflamed monks to catch a glimpse of the Roman classic lying beneath. With the birth of every new mind comes the birth of beautiful new thoughts. With every individual, the world is reborn. And yet, somehow, the unnecessary and distracting scrawl of life and teaching conceals and obscures these original texts.

One can arrive at a fairly precise view of this state of affairs if one thinks of the following. We recognize an animal, a piece of fruit, a flower, and things of this sort as what they are. Could one, however, say that someone who knew partridges, raspberry bushes, or roses only by means of partridge pie, raspberry juice, or rose oil had a full and accurate understanding of these things? And yet, this is how the arts and sciences—and indeed all realms in which we first approach things through thought rather than the senses—proceed. These things are laid before us prepared and transformed and, in truth, in such fashion that we never come to know them in their raw and naked form. Opinion is the kitchen in which all truths are slaughtered, plucked, minced, stewed, and spiced. We are in need of nothing so much as books without reason—books, namely, that present to us actual things and not mere opinions.

There are but a tiny number of original writers and the best of them differ from those less good not nearly so much as we might, after a superficial consideration of the matter, think. One creeps, another runs, one limps, another dances, one drives, another rides to his destination. But route and destination are in every case the same. Only in solitude can one arrive at new and great thoughts.

The question is: how can one arrive at solitude?

One might flee his fellow man—but then one finds oneself in the noisy market of books. One can throw one’s books away, but how does one free oneself from all the conventional knowledge that schooling has stuffed in one’s head? In the true art of self-education, what is most needed and most beautiful, but also rarest and often poorly accomplished, is the art of making oneself ignorant. Just as in a million men only a thousand are thinkers, in a thousand thinkers only one truly thinks for himself. A people is like a porridge which receives its unity only from the pot in which it is found: the pithy and firm will only be found at the bottom, in the lowermost layer of a people: porridge remains porridge, and the golden spoon that takes from it a mouthful does not eliminate the principle of relation by separating the related from one another.

True striving in the cause of learning is not a voyage of discovery like that of Columbus, but a journey of adventure like that of Ulysses. Man is born abroad: to live means to search for one’s homeland. And to think means to live. The fatherland of thought is the heart: at this well he who wishes to drink that which is fresh must himself create that freshness. Mind is but a stream. Thousands have set up camp along it and dirty its water with washing, bathing, and the like. Mind is the arm; will is the heart. One can acquire strength: one can make the strength grow.

But what good is strength without the courage to use it?

A shameful and cowardly fear of thinking holds every one of us back. More repressive than any governmental censorship is the censorship which public opinion exercises over the works of our intellect. To become better than they are, most writers would not require more intelligence but more character. And this is a weakness that stems simply from vanity. The artist and the writer want to outstrip, want to tower above their comrades. But to tower above them they must stand next to them; to overtake them they must follow the same path. In doing so, good writers are very much like bad writers in that in the good writer can one find the bad writer entire. The good writer is simply something more: the good writer follows the same path as the bad writer, only he follows that path somewhat farther.

He who listens to his inner voice instead of the cries and clamor of the market, he who has the courage to teach to others what his heart has taught him, will always be original. Sincerity as regards oneself is the well of all brilliance and mankind would be more brilliant if it were simply more moral.

And now, here is the practical application I promised you:

Take a stack of paper and write. Write everything that goes through your mind for three consecutive days with neither hesitation nor hypocrisy. Write down what you think of yourself, what you think of your wife, what you think of the war with the Turks, what you think of Goethe, of Fonk’s trial, of the Last Judgment, of your superiors. At the end of the three days you will scarce be able to believe what new, unheard-of thoughts have come to you. And that, my friends, is how to become an original writer in just three days!"

Is This Really the Origin of Psychoanalytic Theory?

From “The Art of Ignorance”: An Afterword to Ludwig Börne

"Börne’s method was as simple as it was strange. What he recommended for the finding of one’s most personal originality is something to which we have given the least personal of names: automatic writing. Though the Surrealists made much of this technique, they were not its inventors. Before psychoanalysis was born, Freud was treating neurotics—with limited success. His principal tool was hypnosis. Dissatisfied with the short-lived ameliorations of neurotic symptoms brought about through hypnosis, he began to seek a new method. He found it in free association. By the mid 1890s, he had definitively renounced the use of hypnosis and placed free association at the center of his new analysis. He would henceforth refer to it as the principle means of intercepting the inner voice of his patients. What is surprising is how much of this took place on paper. Freud’s first patient was himself and one of the techniques he developed upon himself was automatic writing.

Years later, in a brief and charming essay published anonymously, Freud wrote of Börne.

Originally enough, Freud speaks of himself in the third person and responds to Havelock Ellis’ strategic compliment that psychoanalysis was a smart and splendid thing, but that it was not science, it was art. One of Ellis’ arguments concerned the use of free association and Ellis quoted to this end a nineteenth-century Swedenborgian doctor who wrote mystical poetry in his spare time and who advocated, in a work from 1857, a form of free association. Originally enough, Freud speaks of himself in the third person and responds to Havelock Ellis’ strategic compliment that psychoanalysis was a smart and splendid thing, but that it was not science, it was art. One of Ellis’ arguments concerned the use of free association and Ellis quoted to this end a nineteenth-century Swedenborgian doctor who wrote mystical poetry in his spare time and who advocated, in a work from 1857, a form of free association.

The disguised Freud begins his response by adding to Ellis’ bibliography more capital and relevant figures—first Schiller, and then, at greater length, Börne.

He tells how a Hungarian doctor directed Ferenczi’s attention to Börne’s forgotten essay, who in turn questioned Freud about it. Freud, still writing of himself in the third person, reports that the volume of Börne’s complete works in which the essay appeared was one which he had received as a gift when he was thirteen, and that it was the only one of the books from this period of his life that he still possessed. Börne “was the first writer in whose works Freud immersed himself.” Freud claims that though he could still remember many of the essays contained in the volume, he had no memory of this essay on original writing and free association. Upon rereading, Freud recognized a number of his own original insights: into “censorship” of an internal rather than a merely external sort, into the value of honesty in the forming of a writer, and into free association. “It seems then that we can not rule out that this reference has uncovered one of those bits of cryptomnesia,” wrote the encrypted Freud, “which in so many cases may be supposed to lie behind a seeming originality.”

Freud wasn’t the only detective on the case.

Commentator Paul La Farge has noted: Among the investigators who studied automatic writing in the hope that it would reveal the workings of the mind were William James, the French psychologist Pierre Janet, and the British team of F. W. Myers and Edmund Gurney, who, undiscouraged by what they discovered, would go on to found the Society for Psychical Research. Each of them came to more or less the same conclusion: Automatic writing was produced by a part of the mind of which the writer had no awareness. Myers called it the “co-conscious”; Janet called it “mental automatism,” and James, prudently, called it nothing at all. A decade later Freud would call it the unconscious, and the name would stick.

More important than this question, however, is another one—a question more of the present than the past. Disguised in Börne’s playful style lies a serious question about the originality of what we write. When we scrape away the layers of moralizing and false learning of which he speaks, what lies beneath? Perhaps the text that lies beneath those layers is a text that we have read before. But is it not infinitely more likely that it is not a text at all but a blank sheet to which we might turn, at last, in full possession of our original powers? There is only one way to find out."