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This volume1 is the third in the Psychoanalysis and Psychological Science Series edited by Elliot Jurist. The authors, Joel Weinberger and Valentina Stoycheva, aim to summarize and synthesize a now extensive literature from cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychology, and social psychology that demonstrates the importance of unconscious processes in human mental functioning, and then to suggest its implications for psychotherapy practice. As the authors acknowledge, this is an ambitious undertaking with the goal of reaching “an understanding of unconscious processes” (p. ix). As the psychoanalyst and researcher Howard Shevrin (2000) has observed, the domains of cognitive science and psychotherapy remain difficult to bridge:
The experimental psychologist and the psychoanalyst live and breathe in totally different ambiences. … the clinician is primarily concerned with singularity … with the uniqueness of the person on the couch, … the experimental psychologist is concerned with generality, the functions and processes shared across people [p. 256].
Shevrin went on to hope that these disparate disciplines can consider the gaps between worlds “as a challenge and opportunity and not simply as a pitfall to be avoided” (p. 258). This volume is an effort of the kind Shevrin had in mind, and aims toward a worthy but difficult goal.
The authors are both practicing therapists, and Weinberger has founded a consulting firm that works with a variety of groups to understand how implicit cognition shapes our perception of information. Based on the text, I am compelled to assume that their therapy practices are built on cognitive-behavioral therapy and its derivatives. References to psychodynamic thought are few and lacking in depth.