Of course, much of this seems mind-boggling in retrospect. Along with the obvious questions these experiments now raise—Why was DESTROY MOTHER considered more aggressive than FUCK MOMMY? Don’t these messages register equal doses of hostile misogyny?—there’s the more serious issue of attributing disorders like stuttering and schizophrenia to psychodynamic rather than biochemical, neurologic, and genetic causes. And did these strange conclusions justify exacerbating symptoms in patients, even if the effects were mild and transient?
Of course, as a kid I didn’t think about any of this. I was nine years old when my father published his 1976 paper, and, to the extent that I paid attention at all, I was mostly intrigued by the tachistoscope. We had one in our apartment. Affectionately referred to in our family as “the tac,” it was about half the size of a twin bed and sat on a large table in my father’s office, surrounded by all those crazy cards. Most shocking to my childish sensibility was the one that read GO SHIT. (I have no memory of a FUCK MOMMY card. Perhaps my father was more discreet with that one.) I would beg to look at the cards through the tac until my father agreed to set up the machine. Then I would adjust the speed of transmission so as to find the exact moment when I could no longer read the inscriptions and they blurred into a flash of light.
In my memory, the blur is connected to the blurred image of my father—flickering and just out of reach. He was always working, even after dinner and on weekends, always a bit oblivious to everything going on outside his experiments. Plagued by insomnia, he usually entered his home office around 4 A.M. and stayed there until it was time to head off for work at the Veterans Administration or N.Y.U., where he had laboratories. Once, I passed by his office late on a Sunday morning and found him sitting, as always, in his brown houndstooth reclining chair. He was still wearing his pajamas, the buttons of the shirt askew, and his eyes were bloodshot with lack of sleep. Stacks of papers encircled him, and the smell of peanuts, which he constantly snacked on, lingered in the air. I understood that he was doing what my mother called “important work,” but why, I wondered, was it so messy? I organized his books, brought empty plates to the kitchen, even rebuttoned his shirt. Later, I overheard my mother refer to my actions as arising from “vestigial Oedipal desire,” but, more than a love object, I think that I yearned to be a caretaker to my father, whose failure to look after himself made him vulnerable in my eyes.
Sometimes on weekends he would take a break, and we would play hangman or Boggle or ask each other riddles. He had a Freudian preoccupation with wordplay, and I loved a pun almost as much as he did (my dream about the bear notwithstanding). But, after a few rounds, he would appear fatigued and invariably propose what he called a “sleeping contest”—competitions in which we would “race” to see who could fall asleep faster. He always won, and after two or three minutes I would return to my room, wondering at his strange notions of fun. I had friends whose fathers worked all the time and were largely absent. My father was around a lot and appeared genuinely interested in me, but spending time with him always seemed to involve exiting the tangible world.
At some point in his research, my father hit on a new message for the tac. This one was designed to ameliorate rather than exacerbate psychopathologies. He began by using it on people with schizophrenia, and it worked so well that pretty soon he was testing it out on typical populations, who, according to his data, were likewise transformed by its effects. The golden message responsible for all this health and felicity? MOMMY AND I ARE ONE. It was a phrase intended to gratify unconscious infantile wishes since, according to classic psychoanalytic theory, all infants yearn for symbiotic connection with their primary caretaker. In the fifties, the Hungarian psychiatrist Margaret Mahler theorized that the infant’s security in this symbiotic bond ultimately allowed it to mature and individuate successfully. Later theorists, building on Mahler’s insights, postulated that occasionally encouraging adult patients to recapture this symbiosis in their fantasies could help them overcome anxiety and negotiate feelings of isolation. In the words of the psychoanalyst Gilbert Rose, “To merge in order to reemerge may be part of the fundamental process of psychological growth.” With MOMMY AND I ARE ONE, my father hoped to aid patients in this process and mitigate their most debilitating neuroses.
My father knew a thing or two about neurosis. To begin with, he was a first-order hypochondriac. His own father and four of his uncles had died of heart disease, the youngest at age thirty-nine. Attempting to stave off a similar fate, my father took his pulse multiple times a day and recorded it, along with other data about respiratory patterns and chest tightness. These observations filled reams of datebooks that he consulted frequently—to what end it was never totally clear. In his free time, he combed Prevention magazine, searching for the latest longevity craze: Bran! Selenium! Powdered milk! For years, he consumed fistfuls of garlic pills daily, which he believed promoted healthy arteries. At some point, he added nightly glasses of green cabbage juice to the regimen. My siblings and I complained that our whole apartment smelled like rotting salad, but my father was undeterred.
Many of my father’s recreational activities betrayed a desire for merged experience. He began jogging in Central Park in the sixties—before the practice was popular—because, he claimed, it made him feel at one with the universe. He found it relaxing to tune our analog television set to Channel 12 and stare at the static. He disappeared into his office for long periods to practice Transcendental Meditation. As a young girl, I found these behaviors baffling, but, seen through the prism of his work, they seem like attempts to achieve what Freud, invoking the French dramatist Romain Rolland, called “oceanic feeling”—a sensation “of something limitless, unbounded.” My father, like Freud, was not a religious man, so MOMMY AND I ARE ONE may have been the closest thing to spiritual transcendence that he could imagine.
In any case, the phrase quickly became a mantra in our house—the answer to every ailment, the punch line to every joke. For a holiday present for my father one year, I created a pillow with MOMMY AND I ARE ONE stitched across it. (My plan was for him to keep it on his analytic couch, but that idea was quickly nixed since, as my father reminded me, the phrase must be presented subliminally to work.) Another year, my sister fashioned a mock tachistoscope out of a huge refrigerator box, complete with message cards, redesigned to reflect an alienated teen-age sensibility, which read something like MOMMY AND I ARE COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY SEPARATE, GO SHIT AND THEN FIND ME SOME NORMAL PARENTS.
Even when the phrase was not explicitly in use in our home, its logic hung in the air. During my early adolescence, I went through an extended period of insomnia that my father sought to cure through an album titled “Lullaby from the Womb,” which he played for me nightly. Released in 1974 by the Japanese obstetrician Hajime Murooka, the record consisted of the pulsating sound of blood rushing through the aorta and umbilical cord of a pregnant woman. Murooka created the album for babies born prematurely, surmising that their occasional distress was due to “homesickness” for the mother’s womb. The album’s cover featured a naked infant sleeping on its mother’s breast. I don’t remember whether it cured my insomnia—I only remember my mortification when a friend came over and picked it up.
“What’s this?” she asked, holding the album cover at a distance from her between two fingers, like a soiled diaper.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s supposed to help me sleep. My dad’s idea.”
“Of course it is,” my friend responded sympathetically. My father’s weirdness was legendary.
Yet out in the professional world his symbiosis experiments proved extremely successful. Women with insect phobias showed fewer symptoms after being subliminally exposed to MOMMY AND I ARE ONE. Smokers craved cigarettes less. In one study conducted by a graduate student in my father’s lab, college students subliminally exposed to the message performed better on their final exams, with marks averaging almost eight points higher than those who got the neutral message PEOPLE ARE WALKING.
In high school, I went through a phase of being anxious about my schoolwork, and my father tried to soothe me by humming. This, too, emerged from his obsession with mother-infant relations. In the early sixties, the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson had observed that some of babies’ first sounds are open-mouthed vocalizations (“ahhh”) but that soon afterward they tend to gravitate to the phoneme “mmmm”—the one sound they can produce when their lips are latched to the nipple and their mouths are full. Jakobson theorized that out of this the word “mama” was born, a word that is almost identical in every language of the world. My father believed that the “mmmm” sound could calm people by unconsciously reminding them of the satisfying experience of being breast-fed, and he began to periodically incorporate “mmmm” into our conversations about homework or an upcoming exam. It was subtle—a prolonged contemplative noise he would make in response to one of my anxious rants—but by high school I was attuned to his interventions and increasingly resistant, especially when he began to encourage me to hum, too.
Nonetheless, something about these talks must have stuck, because in eleventh grade I entered the Westinghouse Science competition with a research project called “Effects of the Sound ‘Mm . . .’ and the Heartbeat on Emotional Response and Creativity in Adolescents.” It earned me a semifinalist award and a ceremony hosted by the New York City mayor’s office, where, standing among hard-core physics and engineering students, I tried to explain the humming experiment to baffled Ed Koch aides. Without realizing it, I had become a convert.
My father’s experiments were met at the time with a mixture of excitement and leeriness. A long profile in Psychology Today in 1982 characterized his work as pathbreaking but also conveyed incredulity. “His data are so surprising that many psychologists simply cannot believe in them,” the reporter, Virginia Adams, wrote. His critics were numerous and far-ranging. They pointed out that the notion of a single message that could work on everyone’s unconscious was preposterous. They also doubted the efficacy of his subliminal-activation method. “It is asking a great deal of the human organism to expect subjects not only to take in a five-word sentence but to interpret it in a very particular way,” the psychologist Donald Spence said. The data, critics contended, reflected unintentional bias or were gathered by associates and doctoral students eager to affirm my father’s work. Some researchers said that they were unable to replicate a few of the fifty-plus studies done by my father and others in the field of S.P.A.
In the face of such criticism, my father remained sanguine. “If they’re going to nay-say the research,” he would respond, “they’ve got to come up with a different explanation to account for the results. The data speak for themselves.” The Psychology Today article maintained a sphinx-like neutrality about the implications of his work. “The closest thing to a consensus about Silverman,” the article concluded, “is that final judgment must wait.”
But, as it turned out, there wasn’t time. Four years later, at age fifty-six, my father drowned. He had been swimming alone in a pond on Long Island. It was a few days after I had left for my sophomore year of college. We never learned his exact cause of death, but it seems likely that cardiac arrest was to blame. His presentiments had been right, but all those garlic pills and pulse recordings had done nothing to save him. He left behind reams of material—unfinished articles, ideas for future research scrawled on paper scraps—and a family devastated by his loss. I remember humming to myself during his funeral service.
The irony of his death is never lost on me. All those years growing up, we were focussed on the inevitable disappearance of the good mother of infancy, the separation from the primary caretaker that MOMMY AND I ARE ONE was supposed to redress. But we were all gazing in the wrong direction, soothing ourselves with fantasies of maternal plenitude when it was our father who would slip away.
With his death came the end of his research and, soon after it, experiments in S.P.A. more generally. In 1990, one of my father’s primary collaborators, Joel Weinberger, helped to conduct a meta-analysis of all MOMMY AND I ARE ONE experiments performed both in the United States and abroad. He later described the results as “reliable, of respectable strength, and . . . of comparable magnitude whether conducted by Silverman-associated or independent labs.” My father’s critics were unconvinced—as one psychologist observed, “Despite this strong evidence, many researchers remain skeptical about the SPA result.” In any event, the debate petered out as S.P.A. research was replaced by studies in implicit memory and automaticity—forms of information-processing that are unconscious without the lurid eroticism of Freudian theory.
When I think of the current attention to pristine automaticity over raw aggression and appetite, I can’t help but feel a sense of loss. The Freudian unconscious can be crude, a blunt instrument with which to make sense of everything from a bad day to irritation at a parent. But it’s also the only intellectual framework I’ve found to explain the inexplicable: a burst of sadism, free-floating anxiety, the will to self-sabotage. I miss my weird, messy father, but I also miss the thing he devoted his life to—the weirdness and messiness of unconscious fantasy, whose primacy these days, despite a recent resurgence in some therapeutic circles, has been overtaken by “problem-solving,” cognitive behavioral therapy, meds.
Perhaps that’s why, some thirty-five years after his death, I’m still keen to defend my father’s interest in Freudian theory. Not all of it, of course. Freud’s reductive developmental stages, as well as his damning views on femininity, I would happily leave behind. But the formative terrain of childhood, the concept of ambivalence, the centrality of unconscious desire and aggression—all still influence the way I look at the world.
One of my sons inexplicably forgot the passcode to his phone a while back, and we spent hours not just trying to recover it but also trying to understand why he forgot it in the first place. Because surely the unconscious was at play—nobody just “forgets” the passcode that they’ve regularly plugged into their device for three years running. When my son recalled that the passcode was an amalgam of his grandparents’ birthdays, I believed that I had figured it out. Two months earlier, my son had told our immediate family that he was gay, but he had been reluctant to share this more widely. “Your grandparents are visiting this weekend, and forgetting your passcode could reflect anxiety about keeping your sexuality hidden from them,” I suggested. My son ignored me, of course; he is about as receptive to psychodynamic interpretations as I was at his age. But I continue to offer them anyway. Having been raised in a household where plumbing one’s unconscious was seen as essential for psychic health, I have the sense that not encouraging my kids to do the same would feel like a form of neglect.
It’s been so long since my father died: the photographs have all faded, and the cassette tapes that he placed in our rooms while we slept are mangled with overuse. But conjuring up the Freudian unconscious in conversations with my kids keeps him close. During these talks, the air buzzes with obscenity—with references to sex, sadism, and scatology. Maybe this is my father’s legacy: not just subliminal messages and humming but also plain unvarnished talk. ♦