You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
From research into the effect upon verbal and autonomic behaviour of subliminal stimulation, evidence has come to light which suggests that verbal responses made during such stimulation tend to be associations to the material presented. The content of these associations, moreover, points to their being symbolic versions, in the Freudian sense, of the act or object connoted by the stimulus material.
It is this latter finding, from the above research, with which this paper is primarily concerned; a more detailed account of the methodology of the relevant experiments being reported elsewhere.
INTRODUCTION
In the present context and throughout what follows 'subliminal stimulation' refers to stimulation, either visual or auditory, of such low intensity that the subject remains unaware of both its nature and its presence. That such stimulation may determine behaviour, that the awareness threshold is not necessarily the physiological threshold, has been shown by several previous researches: Dunlap (1904); Bressler (1931); Baker (1937); Williams (1938); Miller (1940).
Evidence for experimentally induced symbolism in situations where the subject remains unaware of the exciting stimulus has also been forthcoming. Schroetter (1911) and Roffenstein (1924) induced their subjects to dream symbolic versions of tabu material related to them during hypnotic trance. Nachmansohn (1925), similarly, by post-hypnotic suggestion, influenced the ordinary night dreams of his subjects. In the course of experiments involving verbal responses to briefly exposed words Bruner1 and McGinnies1 have noticed that pre-recognition hypotheses frequently appeared to be associations, often of a symbolic kind, to the stimulus material being shown. Fisher (1954), also using the tachistoscopic method, has shown, as Poetzl (1917) did earlier, that that part of the display not consciously discriminated at the time of exposure often served a symbolic function in a subsequent dream.
Finally, Licklider1