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This article makes a new contribution in that it employs three separate interdisciplinary methods, two of which do not presuppose a dynamic unconscious, to provide convergent evidence for the existence of a dynamic unconscious.
Method 1:The Clinical Psychoanalytic Method. Eleven subjects (eight with phobias and three with pathological grief reactions) were evaluated in three or four non- structured diagnostic interviews and in a battery of psychological tests by a team of three psychoanalysts and a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist. From the protocol of each subject, sixteen words were selected, eight of which the clinicians believed best represented the most salient unconscious conflict, and eight which best represented the conscious system. To these two categories of words, two more control categories were added, eight “unpleasant” words and eight “pleasant” words, these in all cases drawn from the end points of the pleasant-unpleasant dimension of the Osgood Semantic Differential research (Osgood, May, and Miron, 1975).
Method 2:The Subliminal Method; and Method 3: Signal Analysis of ERPs. The thirty- two words making up the four categories were presented subliminally (1 ms) and then supraliminally (30-40 ms) in six randomized blocks, while evoked response potentials (ERPs) were obtained from three electrode placements (P3, P4, CzPz). The ERPs so obtained were then subjected by the team of computer scientists and engineers to complex signal analyses. The findings, based on time frequency analysis,