Hidden Minds (31 page)

Whatever the mechanisms that underlie the efficacy of subliminal psycho-dynamic activation, Silverman’s legacy is undoubtedly challenging and thought-provoking; however, perhaps these qualities were also characteristic of Silverman himself. Not only did Silverman choose to begin his research programme in a decade when research into preconscious processing was discouraged, but he then chose to continue this programme into a decade when psychoanalytic ideas were routinely vilified by the academic establishment. He seemed to invite criticism, but when it arrived he had sufficient elan to respond by publishing an article in American
Psychologist
with the mischievous title ‘Psychoanalytic theory: “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated’”.

When Silverman submitted his early work on subliminal psychodynamic activation to the
Journal of Abnormal Psychology
it was swiftly rejected. Silverman was told bluntly that his results were simply unbelievable and therefore could not be published. Whereas most academics in Silverman’s position would have just given up at this point, Silverman was more than happy to contest the decision. He took his case to the American Psychological Association, and after an independent investigation the editorial decision to reject his article was overruled. Silverman’s work was deemed to be of an extremely high standard and obviously fit for publication.

Clearly, Silverman relished controversy. He never dismissed ideas -however outlandish — and believed that any issue could be resolved by designing and conducting the right experiment. Indeed, he was such a committed empiricist that his wife had the epithet ‘It’s an empirical question’ carved on his tombstone. Silverman urged his students to question virtually everything, and inspired generations of researchers (who still remember him with great affection). As a teacher, he is reputed to have been second to none. It would be a mistake to label Silverman as a peripheral figure or a maverick. He ranks among only a handful of psychoanalysts interested in testing psychoanalytic ideas in a laboratory setting, and in many respects his work represents the most successful and exciting of its kind.

Given the importance of unconscious processes in psychoanalytic theory, it is not surprising that the psychoanalytic community has expressed most interest in the therapeutic possibilities of subliminal stimulation; however, the literature on subliminal treatment does contain one conspicuous and notable exception – a report that describes a successful behavioural treatment administered outside awareness.

The behavioural treatment for anxiety involves encouraging patients to confront their fears. Sometimes confrontation is paired with relaxation exercises (as in desensitisation) and sometimes not. Opinion differs between behaviour therapists regarding the value of relaxation exercises performed during episodes of confrontation; however, with or without relaxation, initial exposure to feared objects or situations always produces some anxiety in the patient.

It is possible that behaviour therapy works by exploiting a property of the nervous system called habituation – a progressive tendency to stop responding to repeated presentations of the same stimulus. Habituation phenomena are happening all the time; for example we habituate to background noise -such as traffic or a ticking clock: after a time, we simply stop hearing them. If a behaviour therapist can get his or her patient to remain in a feared situation for a sufficient length of time (usually about half an hour), then the parts of the nervous system producing the symptoms of anxiety will become less active. The more a patient is exposed to a feared object or situation, the more he or she will experience a reduction in anxiety. The difficulty, of course, is getting patients to stay in an anxiety-provoking situation long enough for beneficial effects to materialise. Many patients fail to engage in behaviour therapy because they find the whole procedure too traumatic. They want to leave the feared situation before habituation has occurred.

In 1978 the psychiatrist Peter Tyrer and his colleagues published an article in
The Lancet
titled ‘Treatment of agoraphobia by subliminal and supraliminal exposure to phobic cine film’. In order to make behaviour therapy more tolerable, Tyrer and his colleagues attempted to produce habituation in anxious patients by exposing them to images of fearful situations presented below the awareness threshold.

Thirty agoraphobic women were recruited for the experiment, all of whom had proved resistant to conventional treatment. A supraliminal group watched a film showing scenes likely to trigger fear in someone suffering from agoraphobia (i.e. wide open spaces). A second, subliminal group, were shown exactly the same film, but at an intensity too weak for conscious perception. Finally, a control group watched a blank screen which alternated with a sequence of’a potter working at his wheel’.

The results were extremely interesting. Both the subliminal and supraliminal groups improved more than the control group, becoming less anxious and agoraphobic; however, the subliminal group showed a modest advantage, being a little less depressed than the supraliminal group.

Patients in the subliminal group were at a loss to explain their improvement. This is understandable, as their experience of treatment was simply watching a blank screen. Subsequently, several patients in the subliminal group concluded that the procedure was a subtle means of letting them know that if they wanted to get better then they had better help themselves. This represents yet another example of the conscious mind generating a plausible story, to account for behaviour shaped by events and processes occurring outside of awareness.

Clinical psychologists, psychoanalysts, and psychiatrists have barely begun to explore the therapeutic potential of channelling information directly into the unconscious. Even so, initial results are highly promising. Moreover, given that the demand for psychiatric care far exceeds the supply of relevant services, the appeal of treatment methods that can achieve small but consistent health benefits (sometimes in under a second) is patently obvious; however, irrespective of practical advantages, subliminal interventions will always be dogged by a moral question: Is it acceptable to administer a treatment for which informed consent cannot be given? Until society reaches some consensus on this issue, subliminal treatment will have trouble escaping the long shadow cast by subliminal advertising. (Interestingly, Silverman was frequently approached by advertising executives eager to explore the commercial possibilities of the symbiotic merging fantasy stimulus as a retail tool.) In addition, there is another perhaps even more significant factor that has limited the widespread use of subliminal treatments – professional incredulity. In spite of the evidence, most psychiatrists and psychologists simply don’t believe the positive results that have been reported in the academic literature. Thus, the potential of subliminal therapy — be it modest or revolutionary – will in all probability never be fully realised.

For most people, nightmares are of little significance. Beyond infancy and childhood the distress caused by bad dreams is nothing more than a minor inconvenience. Severe and frequent nightmares, however, are a very different matter. They can be so intense and disturbing that the afflicted individual is completely unable to function. Nightmares of this kind are recognised as a form of psychiatric illness, and guidelines for the diagnosis of
nightmare disorder
have been established by both the American Psychiatric Association and the World Health Organization. Nightmares also frequently occur in the context of other psychiatric problems – in particular, anxiety and posttraumatic stress.

Conventional treatments for nightmare disorder are pharmacological (i.e. using drugs) or behavioural. The behavioural treatment of nightmares is somewhat restricted insofar as it is only applicable to recurring nightmares (i.e. a single nightmare that returns again and again). Treatment involves imaginary rehearsal of the nightmare while awake – but with a modified and preferably happy ending. Eventually this modified version of the nightmare replaces the original during sleep.

A potentially superior treatment for nightmares – the acquisition of lucid dreaming skills – has been available for over a century; however, mainstream practitioners have been reluctant to exploit it.

Hervey de Saint-Denis, the man who discovered lucid dreaming in the late nineteenth century (see
Chapter 1
), was quick to explore its therapeutic possibilities. Indeed, he managed to cure himself of his own recurring nightmare – which involved being pursued through an endless series of rooms by horrific monsters.

Typically, training in lucid dreaming involves cultivating a special type of self-awareness that carries over into the dream world. At its simplest, this can be achieved by frequently asking the question Am I dreaming?’ while awake. Eventually, the very same question is posed while dreaming. The ensuing awareness of being in a dream is generally sufficient to enable the dreamer to alter its course.

Since the time of Hervey de Saint-Denis, only a small group of psychologists and psychiatrists have expressed an interest in lucid dreaming. Even so, the results of these exploratory investigations have yielded some interesting results.

It would appear that the feeling of being in control (i.e. being able to influence the course of a dream) acquired during lucid dreaming often engenders a similar mental state in real life. Thus, patients report being more confident and assertive. There are even descriptions of benefits of a less-tangible – even transcendental – nature. For example, in
The Sun and the Shadow
(1987), the psychotherapist Kenneth Kelzer wrote of one of his own lucid dreams:

Kelzer’s descriptions of the dream world are reminiscent of Jung’s. One is reminded of Jung’s descent into his own unconscious, his encounters with archetypes, and his return as the custodian of arcane knowledge. Although such excursions into the unconscious make compelling reading, most therapeutic applications of lucid dreaming do not rely on contact with the numinous. Indeed, most applications of lucid dreaming rely on more straightforward mechanisms to explain beneficial change, such as the release of emotion or the rehearsal of a skill.

Lucid dreams can be liberating or cathartic. In the dream world, it is possible to engage in behaviours that would be considered unacceptable in real life. Thus, the lucid dream can become a kind of’natural’ virtual-reality game. The unconscious is transformed into a nocturnal playground where frustrated emotions can be vented, forbidden desires satisfied, and physical limitations ignored. The latter may be of particular benefit to the elderly or those suffering from physical disabilities.

With respect to the acquisition of skills, some studies have shown that sportsmen exhibit improved performance after rehearsing complicated manoeuvres in their lucid dreams.

A further application of lucid dreams (so far overlooked) is as a possible environment for the practice of behaviour-therapy exercises. Perhaps patients wary of confronting feared objects and situations in real life could be encouraged to do so in their dreams. Thus, exposure exercises are undertaken in the ‘unconscious’ rather than in the clinic. Could such a procedure be as effective as conventional exposure? Or might it even produce superior results?

A less dramatic although by no means less interesting method of modifying dreams is the
Poetzl effect.
This unusual phenomenon was first reported by Otto Poetzl in 1917, following observations of patients who had sustained damage to the visual areas of the brain. Poetzl discovered that stimuli failing to register in awareness would subsequently enter awareness by some other (often indirect) process. For example, one of Poetzl’s patients was unable to perceive an asparagus fern protruding from a bunch of roses; however, subsequently the same patient showed highly selective attention for a green tiepin which resembled the fern on the collar insignia of a uniform.

Poetzl suggested that in some neurological patients, the mechanisms that suppress information – particularly information that has been registered in the brain but not represented in awareness – break down. Subsequently suppressed information enters awareness, although not necessarily in its original form. Perceptual biases might cause a related object to stand out in the perceptual field (as in the fern and tiepin example), or the original information may enter awareness having undergone some order of transformation (preserving, perhaps, a symbolic relationship).

Poetzl then argued that the healthy sleeping brain might recreate the very same effect. Thus, information that has been registered during the day – but not represented in consciousness – will then appear in dreams. Moreover, a corollary of Poetzl’s argument is that subliminal presentations will also re-emerge from the processing system in the narrative of dreams – albeit in a symbolic or distorted form.

Although the reasoning that guided Poetzl from clinical observations to the laboratory was somewhat suspect, the research he undertook was very encouraging. In his first experiment, Poetzl showed subjects a colour slide of the Temple at Thebes for one hundredth of a second-which is long enough to see, but only fleetingly. Subjects then described and drew what they had seen. Following this laboratory task, subjects were instructed to keep a detailed record of their dreams, to draw sketches of what they saw in their dreams, and, finally, to examine the original picture and compare it with their records and drawings. Interestingly, only those features of the picture unreported by subjects after the initial showing appeared again in subsequent dreams.