PERSPECTIVES IN BIOLOGT AND MEDICINE Volume ? · Number 3 · Spring 1974 TOWARD A NEO-DISSOCIATION THEORY: MULTIPLE COGNITIVE CONTROLS IN HUMAN FUNCTIONING ERNEST R. HILGARD* Below the surface-stream, shallow and light. Of what we say we feel—below the stream, As light of what we think we feel—there flows With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what wefeel indeed. [Matthew Arnold, 1870] ... let not thy left hand know what thy right hand rioeih. [Mait. 6:3] The mysteries ofmind have recently been receiving renewed attention among both laymen and psychological scientists. For a time the advances in behavior theory and behavioral control techniques, largely under the influence of Pavlov and the American behaviorists from Watson to Skinner, seemed to remove most of the mystery of mind by showing how readily behavior comes under stimulus control through the contingencies of reinforcement. In recent years a substantial fraction of people, particularly the young, fed up with technology and contemporary society, have turned inward to discover the range of human potential in other ways. These other ways have included experimentation with psychedelic drugs, meditation, Eastern religions, ESP, and occultism. Much of this searching lies outside the scientific establishment , but it does not leave the scientists unmoved. In psychology there is a growing interest in what is loosely called humanistic psychology,»Professor of psychology, emeritus, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305. The experimentation leading to this paper and its preparation have been aided by research grant MH-3859 from the National Institute of Mental Health. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Spring 1974 I 301 unified (to the extent that any unity can be detected) around the theme that a responsible psychology must be concerned with human values and the deeper meaning of life. Laboratory psychologists, not identified with any of the extreme movements, also begin to take a new interest in the voluntary control of normally involuntary movements (as in biofeedback studies), they offer conjectures about different modes of consciousness associated with the right and left hemispheres, and they turn increasingly to study of sleep and dreams, of hypnosis, of imagination and creativity. What begins as an anti-intellectual movement in the counterculture gradually shifts the center of gravity within the academic and scientific culture as well. The scientists who retain their identity with the prevailing culture do not give up their naturalistic interests, but they focus some measure of their attention on new problems. This is not the first time that such a shift of interest among psychologists and psychiatrists has come about through stirrings in the nonacademic community. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, spiritualism became a great fad. Mediums had not always been around, but they began to appear following the prominence of the Fox sisters in the United States; the wave of interest soon spread to England, Germany , and France, and then throughout the world. This was a partial answer to man's loss of dignity as a consequence of Darwin's teachings, for if evidence could be found for the soul's survival of bodily death man's unique place in nature would be firmly established. The essence of the movement was not anti-Darwinism any more than the essence of the counterculture today is antibehaviorism, but the parallels are instructive. The new science of parapsychology emerged as serious investigators such as F. W. H. Myers and Edmund Gurney in England attempted to investigate spiritualistic claims sympathetically but critically . They founded the London Society for Psychical Research in 1882, to be followed shortly by the American Society of Psychical Research, with the distinguished American psychologist, William James, as one of its leading enthusiasts. The scientific establishment's reply to the spirtualists was to take a look at neglected phenomena, incorporating the findings in naturalistic accounts of them. Borrowing from the psychic investigators such methods as automatic writing, a number of psychologists and psychiatrists became impressed by the dual controls operating in human functioning , a "subconscious mind" along with a "conscious mind." The evidence came not only from the study of purported "mediums," but from hysterical personalities, with their losses of ordinary sensorimotor controls in functional paralysis, blindness, or other sensory defects, and, in...