Unconscious Thought in the Laboratory

Suppose you were asked by your institute's outreach committee to identify a well-crafted empirical investigation of the validity of any of the foundational psychoanalytic concepts (e.g., the dynamic unconscious, infantile sexuality, or the role of frustrated wishes in the development of dreams and the genesis of psychopathology). Suppose further that the committee planned to submit your recommendation of model psychoanalytic research to several cognitive behavioral scientists who had recently abandoned their belief that psychoanalysts avoided putting their assumptions on the scientific testing line.

If you didn't reject your committee's request, but instead scanned your psychoanalytic library, you would eventually find an article in the June 2000 edition of the International Journal of Psycbo-Analysis by Linda Brakel, Howard Shevrin, and their research colleagues, Shasha Kleinsorge and Michael Snodgrass, that might well live up to your committee's expectations. Their experimental investigation of unconscious mentation supports the basic psychoanalytic idea that the organization and substance of primary process thought differs significantly from that of conscious ideation. It also combines methodological innovation, critical psychoanalytic insight, philosophical sophistication, and a thoughtful understanding of the importance of demonstrating to cognitive scientists how psychoanalytic theory is a powerful tool in the scientific study of mind.

Brakel and her colleagues used an ingenious technique for presenting information that is mentally registered but not experienced; in subsequent assessments the information appears as memory traces or dream elements. Grounded in the psychoanalytic assumption that unconscious contents and processes are “psychological and meaningful,” the research team predicted that when asked to decide which of two geometrical patterns was most like a master configuration, experimental subjects who were subliminally exposed to the images would make reliable similarity judgments, even though they were consciously unaware of the patterns' features.

They also predicted that the subliminal presentation of the geometric figures would lead subjects to base their similarity judgments only on the figures' attributes, not on the relationship among the different figures' elements. For example, if the master image comprised two circles and a triangle, subjects would judge a second image of two circles and a triangle to be similar to the master, even if the arrangement of the elements in the second image was different than that in the master. When the images in the experiment were presented subliminally, the Brakel team found that the research subjects did rely on the images' attributes alone to make their similarity judgments. This result lent support to the idea that primary process mentation had indeed been elicited in the laboratory setting.

At the same time, when the images were presented supraliminally, which allowed time for secondary thought processing to emerge, the same subjects based their judgments on the relationships of the attributes of their selected image to those of the master. In other words, if the subjects were aware of the stimulus configuration, a triangle with a circle on either side would be perceived as similar to a square with a triangle on either side, even though the elements in the two configurations were different.

This scientific investigation of unconscious mentation demonstrates that primary process effects can be elicited and measured in a laboratory setting. It also shows that under certain conditions, foundational psychoanalytic concepts can be evaluated convincingly in a non-psychoanalytic setting. The methodological significance of this fact for the testing of psychoanalytic hypotheses has been the topic of considerable debate among psychoanalytically informed philosophers and philosophically minded psychoanalysts.