Testing Freud’s Hypothesis That Word Forms and Word Meaning Are Functionally Distinct: Subliminal Primary-Process Cognition and Its Link to Personality

One of Freud’s seminal hypotheses first appearing in his monograph On Aphasia (1891) posited that word meaning and word presentation (e.g., phonemic and graphemic properties) needed to be distinguished if aphasic symptoms were to be accurately understood. In his later psychoanalytic writing, this supposition was generalized to refer to the primary-process uses of language in dreams, symptom formation, and unconscious processes (1900, 1915). To test Freud’s hypothesis that word meaning and word presentation are functionally distinct when processed unconsciously (Freud, 1891, 1915), 50 participants were tested with a priming paradigm in which a “palindrome” prime, presented either subliminally or supraliminally, was followed by two target alternatives. In the forward condition, the prime (e.g. DOG) was followed with a semantic associate (e.g. CANINE) and a distractor. In the “palindrome” condition, the prime was followed with a semantic associate of the reversed word (e.g. ANGEL) and a distractor. The parti...