White bears and other unwanted thoughts : suppression, obsession, and the psychology of mental control

225 Pages·1994·5.241 MB·English

by  Wegner, Daniel M.

W H IT E BEARS
and Other
U N W A N TED
TH O U G H TS
S U P P R E S S I O N , O B S E S S I O N , AND T H E
P S Y C H O L O G Y O F M E N T A L C O N T R O L
WHITE BEARS
AND
OTHER UNWANTED
THOUGHTS

DANIEL M. WEGNER
WHITE BEAR
AND
OTHER UNWANTED
THOUGHT
Suppression, Obsession, and the Psychology
of Mental Control
THE GUILFORD PRESS
New York London
Published in 1994 by The Guilford Press
A division of Guilford Publications, Inc.
72 Spring Street, New York, NY 10012
©1989 Daniel M. Wegner
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise,
without written permission from the publisher.
Printed in the United States of America
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Last digit is print number: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wegner, Daniel M., 1948-
White bears and other unwanted thoughts : suppression, ob­
session, and the psychology of mental control / Daniel M. Wegner,
p. cm.
Reprint. Originally published: New York: Viking, 1989.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-89862-223-9
1. Thought and thinking. 2. Self-control. I. Title.
BF441.W44 1994
153.4'2-dc20 89-29505
CIP
A portion of this book first appeared in Psychology Today.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the fol­
lowing material:
Excerpts from Human Nature and Conduct by John Dewey.
Copyright 1922 by Henry Holt and Company and renewed 1950 by
John Dewey. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Excerpt from Letters from the Earth by Mark Twain. Copyright
1938, 1944, 1946, ©1959, 1962 by The Mark Twain Co. Reprint­
ed by permission of Harper 6c Row, Publishers, Inc.
Excerpt from The Analysis of Mind by Bertrand Russell. By per­
mission of Unwin Hyman Limited.
Excerpt from “Resolutions” from The Complete Stories of Franz
Kafka. Copyright ©1971 by Schocken Books, Inc. Reprinted with
permission of Schocken Books, published by Pantheon books, a divi­
sion of Random House, Inc.
Paul Zuvella quote reprinted from Sports Illustrated, issue of July
21, 1986. Copyright 1986 Time Inc.
For Toni

PREFACE (1994)
A
A jV t the beginning, an unwanted thought is just an annoy­
ance. You put it out of mind and it pops back suddenly later on.
Despite this interruption, you try to forge ahead, to return to
what you were trying to think or talk about. But then, maybe
right away or maybe later, the thought intrudes once more. If
you are fortunate and do the right things to dispel it, you may
find that the thought eventually does stop bothering you. It goes
away and the episode is over. If you make a few simple mistakes,
though, ones that anyone can make under the right conditions,
the thought keeps coming back again and again.
Where does it get its energy? Why does an unwanted thought
sometimes return in this way —first as an annoyance, eventually
as a burden, and in its extreme form to some people at some times,
as a devastating affliction worse than any disease? How can a
person succeed in avoiding an unwanted thought? This book
presents answers to these questions that have been developed on
the basis of laboratory research on thought suppression. The
research suggests that the desire to suppress the thought is itself
the cause of the obsession. Yes, I know this sounds wrong. It
seems paradoxical indeed to blame our attempt to solve a problem
for somehow creating that problem. But it turns out there is a
great deal of evidence in favor of this odd power of suppression,
and this book reports this evidence.
This new Guilford edition of the book is unchanged from the
first edition, with the exception of this prefatory update. In these
few pages, I would like to report that many things have happened
vii
vni Preface (1994)
·
since the first edition. For one, I have become a collector of ob­
jects and information related to the book. Of course, many stuffed
toy white, bears have made their way into my home and are now
cared for by my children. People have also sent me, or I have
found, enough relevant new information to fill about a foot of
file drawer. Just about every major cartoon strip, for example,
seems to have featured the futility of thought suppression at least
once (Calvin and Hobbes more than that), and I have received
many of these. I have also learned from several scholars all about
what was an apparent Russian obsession with not thinking of
white bears. Dostoevski mentioned this at one point, and of course
there is the story about Tolstoy being asked as a child not to think
of a white bear as well. This must have been a widespread cul­
tural idiom in the Russia of these authors’ time.
A number of other fascinating literary treatments of thought
suppression have also come to my desk. People reminded me of
familiar short stories by Edgar Allen Poe that illustrate the
macabre obsessions that can spring from the desire to suppress
a thought (The Telltale Heart, Imp of the Perverse). There is also
a delightful story by Jorge Luis Borges called The Zahir, about
an Argentinean coin with the noteworthy property that it can­
not be put out of mind. Quotes both long and short from Mark
Twain, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, and many others
have arrived in the mail. And the literary repercussions of thought
suppression are by no means complete. Shortly after the first edi­
tion of this book, Linda Bierds published “White Bears: Tolstoy
at Astapovo” in the New Yorker, echoing in poetry the curious
stream of consciousness of someone trying not to think.
All this literary attention has not done much to warn people
away from thought suppression. The advice “just don’t think
about it” surfaces repeatedly anyway. In my file, for instance,
is a Time magazine (May 1, 1989) clipping of a story that sums
things up by saying: “In short, the most sensible thing to do about
earth-grazing asteroids is try not to think about them.” Mean­
while, several different popular psychology books (that shall re­
Preface (1994) ix
·
main nameless here) —including ones by some of psychology’s
most respected scientists —continue to recommend that people
try “thought stopping” as a form of therapy for obsessions, fears,
or depression. My purpose in writing this book was to tell about
research that specifically calls into question the human ability
to stop a thought. Even though there are some people who think
this is obvious, there are others who remain unconvinced.
The research that has been conducted on thought suppression
since the first edition, both in my laboratory and in a number
of others around the world, has not contradicted the basic themes
of this volume. We now know more details about how thought
suppression operates, and we also have evidence that the same
kind of ironic effects that arise from thought suppression can come
from a number of other kinds of attempts to control one’s mind.
Attempts to concentrate, to be happy, to relax, to be good or
fair, or even just to hold still, create ironic mental processes that
can make us do just the opposite of these things —particularly
when we are under stress or have a lot on our minds. Just as the
white bear comes back, so do many of the other thoughts and
mental states we hope to push away —apparently, just because
we are in fact trying to avoid them. The scientific evidence con­
tinues to accumulate, in other words, to verify the ideas presented
in these pages.
I have formed the distinct impression that the book serves sever­
al audiences, as I have now heard from members of each. I wrote
it originally for the general reader, whoever this lucky person may
be, thinking that everyone has unwanted thoughts and that ob­
servations on this might be both interesting and helpful. The plan
also was to make the book useful to my colleagues in psycholo­
gy, as a reference and as an initial guide to research and theory
in this area. I was hoping to get the topic of thought suppression
into the headlights of other scientific psychologists who might
be intrigued by the research problems and take over the study
of them where my work has fallen short. I am not sure in
retrospect that I planned, however, to try to make the book as