ABSTRACT

For most of its history, laboratory psychology has probed subliminal perception with gizmos-physical devices such as tachistoscopes-for degrading stimuli to liminal levels. The results have been grudging and often controversial. The real psychological action, it is suggested in this chapter, is found in psychological techniques for degrading the stimulus, among them, Ebbinghausian subliminality (in which forgetting degrades the stimulus), Pavlovian subliminality (in which the information is induced associatively), and Freudian subliminality (in which latent contents are transformed into mitigated manifest contents by dreamwork techniques, such as censorship, displacement, condensation, symbolism, and plastic-word representation). Even when gizmos are used to produce subliminal effects, unacknowledged psychological subliminality is likely to play a role in the effects. In this chapter, we first review the status of subliminal processes in experimental psychology, examine some examples from laboratory studies, and then define and illustrate some of the psychological techniques ubiquitously found in the real world (e.g., in jokes, art, ads) for degrading or subliminalizing stimuli.