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.
May 17, 1966 ON THE PRESENCE OF A PHYTHMIC, DIURNAL, ORAL INSTINCTUAL DRIVE CYCLE IN MAN: A PRELIMINARY REPORT. Charles Fisher, M.D. and Stanley Friedman, M.D.
Recent research has demonstrated a sleep-dream cycle characterized by universal, regularly, and tenaciously occurring periods of sleep accompanied by rapid eye movement, drive related physiological activity, and dreaming. The REM periods appeared to be related to fluctuations in instinctual drive activity.
From biologic and psychoanalytic points of view, the authors hypothesize the existence of a rhythmic, daytime, waking fluctuation of drive activity synchronous with its waxing and waning in the sleep-dream cycle. Although there has been little direct evidence for the existence of daytime drive discharge cycles, the less than complete compensatory increase of total dream time on nights following dream deprivation suggests the discharge of blocked REM periods in waking states and, hence, some continuity between the cycles of sleep and wakefulness.
In their attempts to verify their hypothesis, the authors selected oral activities as the most feasible for observation of 'spontaneous drive activity' of awake subjects, and devised an a priori scoring system for these activities. Because of the complex operation of numerous ego activities in the awake subjects, they predicted that oral cycle activity would not be as regular as the REM period cycle, but close to the cycle in sleep. Ten subjects were studied; some precautions were taken against boredom which might itself increase oral activity. Statistical analysis of the data appeared to support the authors' hypothesis. A subsidiary observation was a positive correlation between diminished oral activities and diminished alertness and reading activity in some subjects. The authors speculate that those who showed no variations in alertness and reading activity correlated to oral cycles had greater capacity to neutralize and 'store' instinctual energy for later