This article is the continuation of the Special Section edited by Michael Slevin.
Psychoanalysts may be familiar with some of the neuroscientific discoveries that complement our dynamic understandings of emotional and perceptual processes in the brain, or may be familiar, too, with favorable outcome studies of psychodynamic treatments for chronic depression, panic disorder, and borderline personality. Less well-known, however, to many analysts is the experimental social psychology research that studies and elegantly demonstrates various unconscious processes at work.
John Bargh and Tanya Chartrand summarized some of their group’s extensive work in this area, which is ongoing, in their 1999 article, “The Unbearable Automaticity of Being,” published in American Psychology. The article describes a carefully constructed series of experimental studies that demonstrate perceptions of the environment, which may be supraliminally or subliminally stimulated, and are to a large extent processed outside of one’s awareness. This processing results in changes in behavior, motivation, and mood without conscious knowledge.
Experiments of particular interest to psychoanalysts are those (1) demonstrating particular environmental stimuli, subliminally perceived, impacting subjects’ subsequent evaluations of interpersonal situations; (2) demonstrating subliminally presented stimuli corresponding to either a “good” or “bad” object representations that can affect changes in subjects’ mood and self-evaluation; and (3) showing non-conscious perceptions of environmental stimuli can affect subjects’ behavior, entirely out of their awareness. Others have extended this research paradigm to specifically investigate phenomena embodied in the concept of transference (Gavan M. Fitzsimons and Susan M. Andersen, 2007).
Experiments that concern the impact of subliminally presented stimuli on subjects’ evaluation of their environment are multiple and fascinating. One example of particular interest to psychoanalysts concerns experiments that explore the unconscious linkages in some men between power and sexuality. In a series of linked experiments, male subjects who had previously been seen to have a strong association between power and sex, as scored on the Attractiveness of Sexual Aggression Scale (Neil M. Malamuth, 1989) were exposed to subliminally primed words about power or sex or neither, followed by spoken, target words that also concerned sex, power, or neither. In men who scored high on the Attractiveness of Sexual Aggression scale and who had been primed with power-related words, there was a demonstrably quicker reaction time to sexual target words than to other words. Further, when the high-scoring men were primed in another experiment with scrambled sentences that used power-related words, they routinely rated a female “co-worker” assigned to a joint task with them as more attractive than did the men in this group who had not been so primed. Lower scoring men on the Sexual Aggressiveness Scale did not have this response, when either primed with power words or not (Bargh, Paula Raymond, and Fritz Strack .
Bargh and Chartrand (in preparation) also describe experiments they conducted in which subjects were first subliminally primed with nouns that tend to be associated with strongly positive (music, friends), strongly negative (cockroach, cancer) or mildly positive (parade) or negative (worm, Monday) attitudes for most people. The participants were then asked to perform what they were told was a reaction time test, followed by their responding to two self-report mood measures. The subjects’ reported mood was directly related to the strength and valence of the subliminal stimuli, indicating an immediate affective reaction to environmental stimuli that were unconsciously processed. The authors describe this and similar experiments as strongly suggesting a process of unconscious perception and unconscious evaluation, followed by an effect on mood. The authors write: “One could consider an [unconscious] evaluation as a mode in an associational representation of the environmental object. Moreover, the evaluative ‘tag’ to the object representation could become activated immediately upon the perception of the object.” The idea of associational networks operating unconsciously to affect the evaluation of a subliminal perception, followed by a change in mood or evaluation of the environment, is entirely consistent with, and supportive of, elements of the psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious.
Further, a series of experiments by these authors also demonstrates the impact of supraliminally or subliminally presented stimuli on complex behavior. One group of subjects, for example, were primed with words in an ostensible “language test” that pertained to the elderly. The speed with which this group of subjects left the testing room was markedly slower than the speed of others not so primed. Also, on a post-test, the subjects primed with “elderly” words had greater difficulty remembering aspects of the test situation: in other words, they were behaving, outside of their awareness, as if unconsciously identified with the elderly.
Another fascinating and telling group of experiments (Bargh, Mark Chen and Lara Burrows, 1996) were connected with unconscious racism. In one experiment, half of the participants were subliminally shown faces of young African-American men. All participants were then subjected to a mild provocation by one of their testers. Those participants who had been primed with the images of young black males exhibited more hostile reactions in response to the provocation than did those subjects who were not primed. In a follow-up, the participants interacted in pairs at a mildly frustrating game of Password with their interactions videotaped. Judges who were blind to the subjects’ condition (primed or not by the particular images) rated the level of hostility evidenced within the videotaped interactions. Overall, the subjects who had been primed with the image were rated as having more hostile behavior than were the non-primed subjects. Further, these same individuals rated their partners as having high levels of hostility, when this was not judged to be the case. The researchers concluded: “The effects of stereotypes on behavior could create entirely non-consciously, a ‘self-fulfilling prophesy’ by causing the perceiver to behave in line with stereotypic expectations, to which the stereotyped person may well respond in kind.”
Psychoanalysts, of course, flesh out such experimental findings with their own knowledge of the dynamic unconscious and the ways in which it can specifically influence the associative networks suggested by these experiments. That is, our awareness of specific defense mechanisms such as projection and projective identification can add to an understanding of some aspects of the experiments on unconscious racism, as can our understanding of unconscious fantasies have connected to power relationships or to disowned guilt. A significant contribution of ours would be to explain the variance among individuals in these experimental settings, as what is published is an overall finding for the group of participants. Our theories and observations of development, trauma, conflict and suggestibility are certainly pertinent here. Along these lines, it is interesting that Chartrand is now exploring explanations for individual variability among her responders, though she does so from a more limited social-cognitive model. The fact that there is a body of research coming from outside of psychoanalysis that demonstrates these associative networks, showing them at work in experimental settings, complements and supports our clinical observations and clinically-based theories.
The fact that there is a body of research coming from outside of psychoanalysis that demonstrates these associative networks, showing them at work in experimental settings, complements and supports our clinical observations and clinically-based theories.
Finally, the work of Chen, Fitzsimons, and Andersen specifically focuses on experimental situations that invoke different transferences. They write, “the social-cognitive model of transference … maintains that the phenomenon occurs by virtue of the activation and use of a mental representation of a significant other.” Such an activation occurs entirely unconsciously, as they demonstrate in their experiments. For example, in one experiment, study participants are interviewed about their relationship with, and characteristics of, a significant other. In a subsequent activity at a later time, these participants are subliminally presented with descriptors either positive— or negative—generated by the subject within that interview. Entirely unaware of the subliminal cues presented and the reactions they triggered, the subjects’
perceptions of an individual newly introduced into the experimental setting were clearly affected by the type of cues they had been provided—cues that were particularly meaningful to them on an individual basis.
It is important to note John Bargh is not a psychoanalyst, nor does he seem particularly interested in psychoanalytic elaborations and understandings of these unconscious processes. He is strictly and primarily interested in deriving explanations that fit a model of a social-cognitive unconscious. Andersen, while not an analyst, is much more familiar with psychoanalytic concepts of self, identity, relational schema and transference and seeks to translate these concepts into a social-cognitive model that can be experimentally demonstrated. It is crucial that psychoanalysts keep appraised, in our ongoing education, of the ways in which central concepts about unconscious defenses, object representations, and processes are being explored and tested within related fields. We also may be able to design complementary research that investigates our own hypotheses on individual variances among subjects, particularly in the studies on racism, and on power and sexuality.
Editor’s Note:
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