Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

serious disease by most psychiatrists, but was actually a crime and the subject of much more fear, disgust, and loathing than is now the case. Given these circumstances, it is not very surprising that homosexuals would show more fear and guilt than heterosexuals. Nor is it surprising that homosexuals showed more “renunciation of heterosexuality” than did the heterosexuals. In fact, it’s about as surprising as finding that professional basketball players are taller than professional jockeys—and it offers just about as much support for the reality of castration anxiety.

The female equivalent of castration anxiety is penis envy. “The girl’s love for her father is mixed with envy because he possesses something that she does not have. This is known as penis envy” (Hall 1954, p. 111, emphasis in original). Hall and van de Castle (1965) performed what Eysenck and Wilson (1973) term “the most celebrated of empirical ‘verifications’ of Freudian theory” (p. 166). It turns out to be an astonishingly bad study. Dreams of male and female college students were collected and their contents scored for themes that were assumed, in the absence of any supporting data, to symbolically represent castration anxiety and penis envy. The reader will not be surprised to hear that more castration anxiety themes were found in dreams of males and more penis envy themes were found in the dreams of females. But, as Eysenck and Wilson note, there was a fatal flaw in the study. Some of the critieria for scoring a dream for castration anxiety could only be applied to males. Examples are “inability or difficulty of the dreamer in using his penis” and “a male dreams that he is a woman or changes into a woman.” Similarly, some of the criteria for penis envy could only occur in female dreams. An example is “a female dreams that she is a man or has acquired male secondary sex characteristics, or is wearing men’s clothing or accessories.” Thus, the study almost had to come out as it did. Even if this problem were not present, the unsupported symbolic interpretation of the dreams’ contents would invalidate the authors’ conclusions that the results support Freudian theory.

Hall and van de Castle (1965) also found that males had more dreams than females in which injuries occurred. Females had more dreams than males about babies. Rather than adopt the simple, straightforward explanation that these results reflect real-life differences between men and women, the authors relentlessly interpreted them symbolically as showing castration anxiety on the part of males and “displaced penis envy” on the part of females.

Repression and the Unconscious

The concept of repression is obviously of great importance in Freudian theory, as the foregoing discussion has demonstrated. A defining feature of repression is that it is “motivated” forgetting; that is, it is an active process in which certain memories are blocked from reaching consciousness because of their emotionally negative content. Should such memories reach the conscious level, they could cause serious psychological disturbance.

One well-known phenomenon has long been used to argue for the reality of repression. This is infant amnesia, which refers to the fact that adults have very poor memories for the first few years of life. Freud proposed a characteristically creative explanation for this amnesia. The period of early childhood, according to psychoanalytic theory, is one during which the child is awash with strong sexual desires, most of them incestuous. Since these desires cannot be fulfilled, they result in considerable frustration. Further, in the case of the boy, his lust for his mother may, he fears, result in his castration. These factors lead to a repression of early childhood memories when the Oedipus complex is resolved. Why are all childhood memories repressed, and not just the ones dealing with the child’s sexual desires? Because if any memory from this period came to consciousness, there would be risk that memories of the perverted (by adult standards) and frustrating sexual desires the individual had as an infant would also emerge into consciousness, perhaps causing serious psychological damage.

There is no question that infant amnesia is a real phenomenon. However, research on memory and the brain has shown that its causes are very different from those proposed in psychoanalytic theory. Spear (1979) and Coulter, Collier, and Campbell (1976) have shown that rats also show infant amnesia. Specifically, infant rats trained on simple learning tasks show considerable loss of memory for those tasks over a period of time. Older rats, trained on the same tasks to the same level of performance, show much better memory for the tasks after the same amount of time has passed. In addition to rats, monkeys also show infant amnesia (Mishkin and Appenzeller 1987). It seems most unlikely that rat or monkey infant amnesia is due to the rats or monkeys repressing their incestuous desires for their parents.

The real reason for infant amnesia in rats, monkeys, and humans lies in the nature of the brain of the immature organism. The immature brain is both anatomically and physiologically different from the mature brain. Deep in each temporal lobe of the mammalian brain is a structure known as the hippocampus. Together, the two hippocampi (and, of course, other brain structures) are vital for normal memory function (Zala and Squire 2000). The hippocampi in the human brain do not begin to undergo maturational changes until between four and five years of age (White and Pillemer 1979). Significantly, it is at about this time that the earliest memories adults can recall are found (Waldfogel 1948). Thus, it is the anatomical and physiological changes that take place in the brain, specifically in the hippocampi, that result in more lasting memories being formed by rats, monkeys, and humans who have passed the infant and very young child stages of development.

A second variable operates in the case of humans to make memories of events that took place during early childhood and infancy difficult to recall. This is the development of language. Infants and very young children have no-or at best very limited—language skills. As language develops, it becomes, among other things, a major way of storing information in memory. Adult human memory is language-oriented. Memories of events that took place before language developed must be stored in some nonlinguistic fashion, if they are stored at all. Since the human adult typically uses language processes to code and retrieve memories, the mismatch between the type of coding of prelanguage (infant and early childhood) memories and postlanguage (later childhood and adult) memories will render the former difficult to retrieve. White and Pillemer (1979) have discussed this idea at length.

Many experimental studies have been conducted to validate the existence of repression. Holmes (1974) has reviewed this large literature. He concluded that “there is no consistent research evidence to support the hypothesis” that repression actually exists (p. 649). He further commented that the failure of numerous studies to support the reality of repression was “especially notable in view of the wide variety of approaches which have been tried and the persistent effort which has been made during the last half century to find support” for repression (p. 649).

More recent research on repression has been no more successful in turning up evidence in support of the concept, although claims to the contrary are sometimes made. For example, Davis and Schwartz (1987) argue that the results of their study, in which they asked college students to recall emotional memories from childhood, shows the existence of repression. These authors found that students they termed “repressors’ recalled fewer negative emotional memories from childhood than did other students. However, they also found that these “repressors” recalled fewer emotional memories from childhood for which the associated emotion was positive. What Davis and Schwartz (1987) demonstrated is that some people are better than others at recalling emotional experiences, positive or negative, from childhood. This is not repression.

The unconscious plays a large role in psychoanalytic theory. It includes “instinctual drives and infantile goals, hopes, wishes, and needs that have been repressed, or concealed from conscious awareness, because they cause internal conflict” (Bootzin et al. 1986, p. 455). Thus, the Freudian unconscious is a seething cauldron of lusts, desires, and frustrations. Does such an unconscious actually exist? Research in cognitive psychology has revealed a great deal about the nature of conscious versus nonconscious cognitive processing. It is clear from this research (for a review see any recent cognitive psychology text) that a great deal of cognitive processing goes on outside conscious awareness. Further, such processing cannot be brought to consciousness even when an individual wishes to do so. However, the character of the “unconscious” processes that have been discovered by cognitive psychologists are different from the processes in the unconscious postulated by Freud. For example, it has been repeatedly shown that when a single word is presented visually, that presentation activates a stored representation of the word’s meaning in the subject’s long-term memory. In addition to activating the presented word’s semantic representation, it also activates the semantic representations of words related in meaning to the presented word. Thus, the presentation of the word king will also activate the internal representation corresponding to the word queen. This activation of the representations of both king and