Perception, Consciousness, and Freud's “Project”

In a recent paper (Basch, 1975), I examined the need for and the operation of psychological defenses mounted against anxiety-provoking environmental reality. The clinical evidence indicates that there is a transformation that must take place before a percept becomes conscious and it is here that defenses against potentially traumatic percepts are active. For example, hypnosis, hysterical blindness, and negative hallucination clearly show that it is not effective perception that is lost in these cases but rather that the path to subjective awareness of the anxiety-provoking percepts in question is blocked. That this sequence is not limited to pathological conditions or to artificial situations is shown by the universality of so-called subliminal perception, i.e., the brain's registration and transformation of percepts that have never reached conscious awareness.

Klein (1959) cites the impressive body of evidence validating the accuracy of subliminal stimulation experiments and discusses the difficulties this finding poses for the conceptualization of consciousness, attention, and defense in psychoanalysis. That the brain registers and utilizes stimuli from the external world which were never in subjective awareness contradicts a fundamental postulate of Freud's metapsychology, which equates perception with consciousness (Pcpt.-Cs.) and then makes that identity the basis for the test of reality (Freud, 1892–1899, p. 234; 1900, pp. 615–617 and 541, n. 1; 1917, pp, 231–233; see also McGuire, 1974, p. 38).