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Donald Spence recently emphasized the degree to which patients' utterances in psychoanalysis are verbal descriptions of pictures—of dream, fantasy and memory images. The observational basis for inference of psychoanalytic constructs is often found in exactly this type of report. Of course, this has been known for a long time, and there is a well-established tradition of diagnostic testing where attempts are made to study constructs such as “primary process thinking” and “defensive activity” by perceptual techniques, such as the Rorschach.
These attempts have been partly successful. What Smith, Professor of Psychology at Lund University, and Danielsson, the psychoanalyst, demonstrate in this book is that they can be more successful still by the application of more sophisticated theory and more sophisticated tools for the study of perception and personality.
Their starting point is that perception is a process of construction of reality. The end-product of this process is the stable, interpersonal percept, lacking in subjective components. However, such components, especially affective and defensive aspects of the perceptual process, are very much in evidence in the normally unconscious prestages of the final percept. These prestages are either totally excluded, or reach consciousness only as such fringe phenomena as vague moods, etc.
Evidently, the crux of the matter is to capture and make conscious these perceptual prestages. The technique used by Smith and Danielsson is basically to present (anxiety arousing) pictures for such short times that a correct interpretation cannot be reached. A sequence of such presentations at increasing presentation times yields reports from the subject