Forgetting of Tachistoscopic Exposures as a Function of Repression

Abstract

The Afenninger Foundation Despite considerable recent interest in Poeczl's method (Luborsky & Shevtin, 1956) for artificial induction of day residues, verification of his work is still incomplete. In his method, a picture is exposed at .01 sec.; S describes and draws what he can recall. The next day he brings in any dreams he had that night and these are found to contain unreported aspects of the picrure. Our recent replication (Shevrin & Luborsky, 1958) gave similar results, but did not provide convincing evidence that che dreams (and the waking images we added) recovered any material that was missed on the first day for dynamic reasons. What follows is a new analysis of the data of the 1958 experiment. We began by a review of che concept of repression and of how its various facets should appear in the and subsequent recovery of fleeting impressions chat take place in the Poetzl phenomenon. The conditions leading to repression include (1) the withholding or withdrawal of attencion from something. Withholding of attention refers co instances in which the person did not become aware of the scimulus at all. Withdrawal of accention refers co che forgetting of a stimulus of which he was initially aware. (2) The withholding or withdrawal may be prompted by the anxiecy that would have'been aroused had the percepts or memories been fully actended to. (3) The unattended to percepts or memories do not simply await the return of attencion in an unchanged state; they tend to become further drawn into the conscellacions of previously repressed memories. We distinguished two main groups of people among 26 Ss according to their pattern of conscious remembering: 12, who after a day's delay forgot some of these impressions (decreasers), and 9, who increased the recall of these impressions (increasers). Only items of information of whose presence they had been certain were included. If the decreasers were repressing, certain inferences about their performance should follow. By and large, these were confirmed. (a) The decreasers (as compared with increasers) recovered more aspects of the picture that had never appeared in conscious recall (an average of 4.4 recovered items vs. 1.8, t = 4.483, PI < .005). (b) They had dreams and images whose manifest content was rated as more filled with unpleasant and anxiecy arousing material (t = 3.077, PI < .005). Furthermore, the more