"Mommy and I are one" is a phrase that is claimed to be an effective subliminal message to aid in self motivation to some Freudian psychologists. The theory is this fulfills an Oedipus complex (as would similar vocabulary about defeating father). The efficacy of complicated subliminal messages such as this is much disputed, however.
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Theory
The use of this phrase is propounded in a paper by Lloyd Silverman and Joel Weinberger in 1985, entitled "MOMMY AND I ARE ONE: Implications for psychotherapy", published in the American Psychologist.
According to Silverman and Weinberger, this phrase works because "there are powerful unconscious wishes for a state of oneness with `the good mother of early childhood' ... and gratification of these wishes can enhance adaptation."
Silverman and Weinberger say that:
Two meta-analyses published in 1990 (one by Hardaway in Psychological Bulletin and another by Weinberger and Hardaway in Clinical Psychology Review) also supported the use of the phrase.
A related work claimed that in a game of darts, the phrase "BEATING DAD IS OK" improved scores via its "subliminal activation of Oedipal fantasies."
Criticism
This has been met with considerable skepticism in the scientific community. In general, subliminal messages have not found to have been effective. "Mommy and I are one" is a fairly complicated phrase that seems to require cognition to process, unlike a visceral image of bear or simply the word "enemy." A report from The Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice said:
Numerous studies had previously demonstrated semantic activation of single words under conditions in which subjects had no phenomenal awareness of the stimulus, as we noted in our reviews. However, no priming study had shown that multiple words, presented subliminally were capable of semantic activation... A recent study by Draine (1997) has cast considerable doubt on the proposition that multiple words presented subliminally can be comprehended. In his work, Draine established that priming effects of word pairs are a function of individual word meanings, rather than their combined meaning. For example, the pair of words "Not Dirty" was perceived to be evaluatively negative. The impact of the prime was uninfluenced by its negation. Draine concluded that two-word grammatical combinations are beyond the analytic powers of unconscious cognition. (see also Greenwald and Liu, 1985). [1]Additionally, there has not been much success in replicating these results, casting doubt on the validity of the initial studies.