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FREUD'S INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS PROVIDED the cornerstone for the psychoanalytic tradition's enduring interest in the classic psychological functions of human life—memory, attention, perception, affect, thought. However, unlike the experimental and academic approach of the classical psychologists, the psychoanalytic tradition studied these phenomena in situ. Not only did this bring "life" into the rather dry and disembodied "mechanisms" of classical psychology, but it brought psychoanalysis together with disciplines that had been developing separately and in relative ignorance of each other, such as anthropology, psychology, history, esthetics. However, the results of these "marriages" have not always been one of equality. Usually psychoanalysts have seen their task to be one of explaining the phenomena of the other disciplines, and less often have they pursued the goal of being informed by them.
Two exceptions come to mind—David Rapaport and Ernest Schachtel. In each, a central concern with affect, attention, memory and thought, combined with primary grounding in the perceptual-expressive investigation into personality (projective testing), led to a wide-ranging attempt to understand human development within a psychological as well as psychoanalytic framework. Other similarities between these two writers also exist; one such example is their view that affect does not only arise as a result of drive-action inhibition or thwarting, a position not often shared by other psychologists and psychoanalysts.1, 2 However,