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Freud is placed in the tradition of Helmholtz (1867), who introduced the notion of “unconscious inference” for the feats of perceptual interpretation that we effortlessly deploy to achieve depth perception and constancy scaling in extracting underlying coherences from ever-shifting manifest stimulus arrays. Freud is treated as extending the problem of unconscious inference from sight to insight: By some remarkable interpretative feat, we likewise extract latent semantic contents from ever-shifting manifest presentations. Context is, as in visual perception, what enables us to extract latent contents, and it is distortions of context that often lead to misinterpretations in both insight (e.g., delusions) and in sight (e.g., perceptual illusions). Disinhibited states produce unravelings in normal psychological organization (secondary-process functioning), revealing the primitive, primary-process features that Freud associates with the System Unconscious, Ucs. (or id). Disinhibited contents and operations are especially in evidence in disinhibited states like psychotic delusions, dreams, fantasy, jokes, and subliminal perception, examples of some of which are examined (e.g., the Pötzl-Fischer effect, a grafitto about Picasso's balls, a case-history fragment of the paranoid, N) and linked to the artist's gift for
Matthew Hugh Erdelyi is Professor of Psychology, Brooklyn College and the Graduate School, CUNY, New York.
intentionally intermingling primary and secondary processes in hybrid creations (e.g., Bosch's Garden of Delights).