Psychoanalytic Research. Three Approaches to the Experimental Study of Subliminal Processes: Edited by Martin Mayman. Psychological Issues, Vol. VIII, No. 2, Monograph 30. New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1973. 135 pp.

This publication is an expanded version of a 1966 American Psychological Association Symposium. It includes three experimental and two philosophical papers dealing with problems of methodology, relevance, and soundness. Mayman provides a brief historical survey of psychoanalytically related research, and some explanation of the importance of experimentation as a means of hypothesis testing, discovering new data, and developing theory.

Donald P. Spence and Carol M. Gordon, in Activation and Assessment of an Early Oral Fantasy: an Exploratory Study, describe their studies of the effect of the interplay of rejection, characterologic orality, and subliminal stimulation on subjects' recall of word lists and their importation of falsely recollected words. Characterologically oral individuals responded to the combination of rejection and subliminal exposure of the word 'milk' by importing regressive oral words (milk, bottle, nipple, etc.) when asked to recall a word list, and by tending to recall the more infantile words on the list (suck, mother, formula). The bias toward infantile food words is taken as supporting the idea that an organized unconscious fantasy is activated by rejection, and its influence emerges in verbal recall if an 'associative network' is activated by a mediating subliminal stimulus.