From a scientific vantage point, the crisis in which psychoanalysis finds itself is both a challenge and an opportunity. It is a challenge because we have so much to lose that is worthwhile and irreplaceable. It is an opportunity because we are again (as at the beginning of psychoanalysis) looking beyond our immediate horizon to see how our insights and discoveries relate to other disciplines and what other disciplines have to offer us.
But interaction with other disciplines should be a two-way street. From my knowledge of the neurosciences and cognitive psychology, I am convinced that there is much these disciplines can learn from an accurate knowledge of psychoanalysis. My work, and that of my colleagues, draws upon cognitive and neurophysiological approaches to studying unconscious processes, in particular the investigation of unconscious conflict — a topic not dealt with at all in the neurosciences and cognitive psychology.
In our research we draw on a number of methods: clinical psychoanalytic, cognitive, and neurophysiological. A neurophysiological method, for example, in concert with the two other methods can answer a psychoanalytic theoretical question. Some psychoanalysts believe that only psychoanalytic data can answer psychoanalytic questions. This position hamstrings psychoanalysis as a science, leaves it without support from neighboring sciences, and limits what we can offer other sciences.
Our findings provide support for the existence of unconscious conflict and its role in psychopathology. In one study, patients were given a thorough psychodynamic evaluation, consisting of four open-ended interviews and psychological tests (found to be the best predictors of outcome in the Menninger psychotherapy research studies). Based on a psychodynamic formulation, we selected words and short phrases that captured the patient's conscious experience of the symptom and the underlying unconscious conflict. These stimuli were presented both subliminally and supraliminally. Brain responses (event-related potentials) revealed that when subliminally presented, the unconscious conflict words were categorized as “going together.” When the same words were presented supraliminally, the patients' brain responses failed to put the conflict words in the same categories. Some inhibitory process was at work. When asked later to place the words in as many categories as they deemed suitable, the patients placed the unconscious conflict words in many more categories than they did the conscious symptom words.
What do these findings imply? A cognitive method (subliminal and supraliminal stimulation) and a neurophysiological method (event-related potentials) can be used to answer an important psychoanalytic question about the existence and influence of unconscious conflict as determined by a psychodynamic method (the interviews and psychological tests).
In this study, psychoanalytic clinical theory was used to identify an unconscious conflict and to select stimuli related to it. A neurophysiological method revealed that certain brain responses are markers for unconscious conflict, thus opening the door to further neurophysiological investigations of the purely neurophysiological parameters of unconscious conflict. We also found intriguing brain frequency differences between unconscious conflict and symptom-related words as a function of subliminal and supraliminal durations; this bears further investigation.
Currently we are trying to pinpoint the cause-and-effect relationship between unconscious conflict and symptom experience. Using another, related cognitive technique (priming), we have found that a possible effect of the unconscious conflict stimuli is to delay attention to the conscious symptom words — a kind of mini-withdrawal (in metapsychological terms, a delay in investing attention cathexis) from the meanings related to the phobic circumstance. This only occurs when the unconscious conflict meanings have been activated subliminally. When the unconscious conflict words are supraliminal, the delay does not occur.
In other research, using a straightforward cognitive conditioning paradigm, we have demonstrated that aversive conditioning can take place entirely unconsciously. An earlier study revealed the existence of an unconscious expectation of an aversive stimulus highly suggestive of unconscious signal anxiety. In both studies, brain responses allowed us to investigate the unconscious nature of phenomena of importance to psychoanalysis.
We have also investigated the sticky issue of unconscious affect. We have shown that negative and positive emotional words can be differentiated both subliminally and supraliminally by differences in event-related potentials. We have investigated people who suffered early loss of a parent or sibling and how they responded subliminally and supraliminally, in particular to positive affect words associated with intimate personal relationships. The event-related potentials showed that these people responded to such positive affect words as if they had negative affective valence.
This finding only appeared when the words were presented subliminally; supraliminally the subjects who had suffered a loss were no different from non-loss control subjects. In addition, we have found differential facial musculature responses in keeping with the expectation that affect expression can be aroused subliminally.
I believe that our research demonstrates how other methods, cognitive and neurophysiological, can contribute to answering psychoanalytic questions. At the same time, our findings point to the way in which cognitive psychologists and neurophysiologists can broaden the scope of their own disciplines by learning about what psychoanalysts have to say about unconscious conflict, signal anxiety, and unconscious affect.
Howard Shevrin, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology in the Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology at the University of Michigan and a faculty member of the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute.