Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

June 12, 1956. A STUDY OF 'THE PRELIMINARY STAGES OF THE CONSTRUCTION OF DREAMS AND IMAGES'. By Charles Fisher, M.D.

The experiments reported are extensions of Fisher's previous work on preconscious perception, utilizing Poetzl's method of tachistoscopic exposure of pictures and the examination of subsequent dream material for derivatives of these stimuli. In this study pictures were tachistoscopically exposed to the subject below recognition thresholds. Immediately following a tachistoscopic exposure, the subjects were requested to close their eyes and to report and make drawings of any images that had developed. This is described as a process of 'free imagery' analogous to free association. Following the period of the 'free imagery', the subject was requested to make comparisons between the drawings of his images and the number, words, or pictures that had been exposed upon the screen. In a combined dream-imagery experiment, the re-exposure of the picture was postponed until the next day, and instead the subject was given a suggestion to have a dream that night. Drawings of the manifest dream images (if any) were obtained. Protocols of sixteen positive results are reported with graphic illustrations. These suggest very strikingly that memory images of preconscious percepts derived from the tachistoscopically exposed picture appear in the images that develop during the period of 'free imagery' and in subsequent dreams. The images which developed during the imagery experiment may be photographic or distorted representations of the preconscious percept, resulting from the tachistoscopic exposure. These images are constructed in precisely the same manner as the manifest images of dreams. According to Fisher, manifest dream images may in part be reactivations of such images.

Fisher suggests several implications for the theory of perception, including a revision of Freud's model for the construction of the manifest dream content. It is demonstrated that perc