Mommy and I are one

"Mommy and I are one" is a phrase that is claimed to be an effective subliminal message to aid in self motivation. The efficacy of complicated subliminal messages such as this is much disputed, however.

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 the 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:
 * Neutral subliminal messages, such as "people are walking," have no effect on subjects.
 * Disturbing messages, such as "Destroy Mother," have a negative effect.
 * In areas where the usual term for mother is something different, such as "Mama" rather than "Mommy," the phrase "Mommy and I are one" has no effect.

Some follow-up work has claimed that in a game of darts, the phrase "It's OK to beat dad" improved scores.

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).

Additionally, there has not been much success in replicating these results, casting doubt on the validity of the initial studies.