Psychoanalytic Research in Attention and Learning: Some Findings and the Question of Clinical Relevance

Some years ago, David Rapaport asked a group of us to carry out experiments aimed at testing his theory of the relationship between perception, short-term memory, and learning. The approach taken was to link the general theory of psychoanalysis to laboratory observation through a number of lower-order experimental hypotheses, just as the general theory is linked to clinical observation by lower-order clinical hypotheses. This program generated a series of experiments, most of which have been reported elsewhere (Schwartz and Schiller, 1970). In this earlier report we evaluated the findings and their theoretical implications. We then asked: are these findings of clinical relevance? In the past, proponents of learning theory have attempted to generalize from the laboratory to the clinical situation (e.g., Dollard and Miller, 1950; French, 1933; Kubie, 1934). Such attempts have not had much impact on the theory or practice of psychoanalysis—in part, because the terms of the two theories are so very different, making