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SYCHOANALYTIC theory has long since grown accustomed to adolescent rebelliousness. Like the parent who conceives and cares for his offspring only to find one day that all past efforts are now met with ingratitude and desertion, psychoanalysis has spawned many concepts in psychology which somehow stray from home and eventually lose their parental identity. Some current emphases in the field of perception do not deviate from this familiar pattern.The notions of perceptual vigilance and defense, for example, have their direct counterparts in psychoanalytic theory. Though the link between the two still receives some acknowledgment (we seem to be in the "early straying" stage now), the portents are ominous. The critics are once again assailing the untestability of the original psychoanalytic formulations-a certain cue for a quick fadeout. For example, Postman and Brown, in a recent comment on the mechanism of repression, say: "It seems to us that theoretical arguments relating perception to such general personality factors hold out little promise for the precise specification and experimental manipulation of the conditions under which variations in perceptual behavior occur" (11, p. 219).Having advocated the testability of psychoanalytic hypotheses on other fronts (1, 4), the present writer undertook the following experimental investigation in the area of perception. HYPOTHESESPsychoanalytic theory encourages the derivation of two hypotheses concerning the perception of psychosexual stimuli. First, sexual and aggressive impulses, denied con-1 Based on a paper presented in a symposium on "Measuring Human Motivation" at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Washington, D. C., 1952.

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The heuristic value of a broad conceptual framework for mental processes was explored in the context of the currently popular topic of arousal. The model pointed to the necessity for distinguishing "cognitive" from "organismic" arousal and for differentiating the effects of various sources of arousal upon mental activity. Posthypnotic programming of a trained S was then utilized to induce degrees of anxiety, pleasure, muscle movement, and alertness. A 5th source of arousal, intensities of white noise, was interspersed with the others during a visual discrimination task. The series of experiments began with a general comparative investigation of the influence of these sources upon response latency, followed by more specific probes designed to elaborate the framework.