Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

PDISCUSSION: Dr. Otto Isakower contrasted Poetzl's experiments with Dr. Fisher's, pointing out that the images presented by Dr. Fisher to the patient were more constrictive and coercive than the visual images in the original experiments of Poetzl. He thought that the subliminally perceived snake was a foreign body with which the ego dealt by expulsion or repudiation. This is borne out by the prominent use of projective mechanisms in the dreams. These he believed represented an exteriorization of an implant, and were not autochthonous. He raised the question: Does the dreamer deal with his own homosexual problem, or is the homosexual nature of the latent dream content an appropriate response to the aggression implied in the experimental situation? Is the conflict intrapsychic or interpsychic?

Dr. Robert Holt pointed out that in order to comprehend the nature of subliminal stimulus it is necessary to refer to the concept of the stimulus barrier. Monotonous, unimportant repetitive stimuli probably do not register as memory traces. Partially perceived stimuli when important (as they are made by the transference in the experimental situation) are likely to stimulate all possible channels of registration. The relationship of the patient-experimentor stimulates registration; so also does the nature of the stimulus (the snake). Dealing with the main theme of the paper—that subliminally perceived stimuli are more subject to primary process transformation in the service of id drives, and are less stable memory traces—Dr. Holt pointed out that in fact these memory traces must be quite stable, as shown by their later recovery during the imagery experiments. He questioned the idea that the central point of sensory intensity in the dream focused on the subliminally registered snake percept. He wondered if this could not be explained by the fact that the stimulus was a snake, rather than that it was subliminal. He also felt it was important to clarify the point of max