According to psychoanalytic theory, people have
unconscious beliefs that are kept from becoming
conscious by a psychological mechanism termed
“repression.” Researchers investigating the nature of
this mechanism observed occasions on which a
patient undergoing therapy became aware of and
expressed a previously unconscious belief. They
found that such occasions were marked by an unusual
decrease in the patient’s level of anxiety.
If the information above is true, and if the
researchers’ investigation was properly conducted,
then which of the following must also be true?
(A) Changes in the patient’s anxiety level during
therapy can generally be used as an accurate measure
of the extent to which the patient is becoming
conscious of previously repressed beliefs.
(B) Even when one of a patient’s unconscious beliefs
remains unconscious, researchers are sometimes able
to discover this belief.
(C) If psychoanalytic theory is correct, then most
conscious beliefs originate as unconscious beliefs,
(D) Researchers were able to distinguish expressed
beliefs that had previously been unconscious from
those that had long been conscious but that the
patient had not previously expressed.
(E) Although the beliefs on which the mechanism of
repression works are all unconscious, the operation of
the mechanism itself is some thing of which patients
are consciously aware.