Q. Has the “Imp” been whispering perverse thoughts in your ear lately, such as “Go ahead and jump” when you're on a high bluff, or “Confess” when you'd rather keep something to yourself? Just who is the Imp?

A. In Edgar Allen Poe's “The Imp of the Perverse,” the protagonist carries out the perfect murder and enjoys his ill-gotten gains, constantly reassuring himself, “I am safe...” But one day his mantra changes to “I am safe, yes, if I be not fool enough to confess.” With that thought, he comes undone, says Jonathan Haidt in “The Happiness Hypothesis.” Now the more the murderer tries to suppress the thought of confessing, the more insistent it becomes until he panics and blacks out. When he comes to, he learns he has made a full confession. Now researcher Dan Wegner has brought the Imp — ”the divided mind,” really — into the lab, asking subjects to try hard NOT TO THINK ABOUT something, such as a white bear, food, etc. It can't be done of course, and soon the thought comes flooding in, with the automatic and controlled mental processes going at cross-purposes, says Haidt. Automatic processes generate thousands of thoughts and images every day, some of them scary or shameful shockers that we try to suppress or deny. “And once we have tried and failed to suppress them, they can become the sort of obsessive thoughts that make us believe in Freudian notions of a dark and evil unconscious mind.”

 
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