Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

April 20, 1965. ACTIVATION AND MEASUREMENT OF AN EARLY ORAL FANTASY: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY. Donald P. Spence, Ph.D.

Dr. Spence's experiment was inspired by a clinical episode during the analysis of a young man who began treatment in a state of heightened deprivation when he was abruptly restricted from smoking during the analytic hour. He than gave up smoking altogether. In the third month of analysis, his car was damaged by a parking attendant. He rushed home, tried to eat, and then began to smoke, breaking his self-imposed abstinence. Dr. Spence concludes that the injury to the car constituted a thinly disguised rejection which aroused an infantile oral fantasy and resulted in regressive oral behavior.

The author designed an experiment modeled after this clinical episode. Subjects were made to feel rejected directly through comments and indirectly by various maneuvers such as being told to lower their heads and close their eyes during part of the procedure. He expected to arouse an oral fantasy if the subjects tended to equate food with affection as did the analytic patient. Some weeks after the experiment he measured the tendency of the subjects to eat when they were rejected. Subjects were exposed to the subliminal stimulus 'milk'. They were divided into high and low oral groups, depending on the degree to which food and affection were equated, and into four subgroups: rejected with subliminal stimulus, rejected with blank slide, accepted with subliminal stimulus, accepted with blank slide. The findings indicated that the erroneous recall of regressive oral words was much more frequent in the rejected-subliminal group. When rejection was followed by a subliminal stimulus, there were more oral regressive words than with rejection alone. Oral regressive words were not produced by the stimulus unless followed by rejection. The conclusion reached was that a certain kind of fantasy had to be aroused before the stimulus 'milk' generated regressive associ