The Law of Reversed (or Opposite) Effect

I can’t believe I have lived as long as I have, read as much as I have read, and not known of the Law of Reversed Effect. I came across it while listening to a new-agey sleep hypnosis podcast. Essentially, the Law is that the harder you try to do something, the more difficult it is to do. The simplest operational principle is that whenever the conscious and the subconscious mind disagree, the subconscious always wins. If you can’t think of a name, your conscious mind cannot drag it out of the subconscious, no matter how hard you try. But a few minutes or hours later the name will suddenly float up from your subconscious.


The Law seems to be a basic tenet of hypnosis and the basis of the power of suggestion and auto-suggestion. It was articulated by a French hypnotist, Émile Coué, at the turn of the 20th Century. I haven’t really gotten clear on the details of how it supposedly works in those fields, but those who claim to know say it works and they provide lots of examples.


I do know that sleep is probably the simplest example: you cannot make yourself go to sleep. You can only get your conscious mind out of the way and let yourself fall asleep. Either distract the conscious mind or simply let it wander, but don’t focus it on sleep. If you do, you will stay awake, and the possibility of sleep will be pushed aside. You will wonder why you can’t sleep, you will tell yourself to sleep, but as long as you think about it, you will stay awake. The subconscious simply will not be told what to do.


The reason this appeals to me, other than filling in a major lacuna in my knowledge, is that it seems to explain writer’s block. If one has trouble getting the writing mind (which being creative is subconscious) going, one cannot force it into action. You can’t logically make creative. That, to me, explains why it’s often helpful, maybe even critical, to simply go ahead and write even when the “creative juices” refuse to flow. Writing nonsense or crap eventually bores the conscious mind or, in an image I like, gets the subconscious so appalled, or maybe intrigued, by the garbage that it kicks in and makes it right.


The real world version of this that comes to my mind is the production meeting for a Saturday Night Live show back in the 1970s; Paul McCartney was scheduled to appear, and he and the producer (I think Lorne Michels) were discussing what songs he would play. Michels suggested “Hey Jude,” but Paul said no. Then, trying to convince Maca, Michels sat at the piano and started to bang it out. Paul was so appalled by the trashing of his song that he gave in, said he would play it, just so long as Michels would stop.


So it might help to think of your conscious mind as the tone-deaf producer, and your subconscious as the talented songwriter/musician who is reluctant to play but doesn’t want his real work trashed.


It all makes sense to me. For what that’s worth.