You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
When I was in graduate school studying to be a cognitive psychologist, my fellow students and I were forbidden to use the words “conscious” or, worse yet, “unconscious,” even though, at its inception, experimental psychology averred that a critical concern of the field was the content of consciousness. As experimental psychology rejected the study of the unconscious—indeed, of mental life in general—psychoanalysis remained true to its founder's call that its comprehension was critical to understanding human behavior. If you like, psychoanalysis held the fort while troops of experimental psychologists wandered lost in the forest. They turned their attention to behavior, certain that principles of stimulus-response (S-R) contingencies were sufficient for a complete psychology. It took decades for the field to realize that S-R contingencies could never fully explain language, memory, thinking, and feeling, or to develop an alternative, cognitive psychology. In his new book, What We Don't Know We Know, Ken Eisold observes that because experimental psychologists are no longer only interested in simple acts of perception or motor action, but also in the area in which psychoanalysts are expert—the role unconscious emotions, motives, goals, and implicit memories—the two fields have much to share and gain from one another.
The irony is that just as experimental psychologists rediscovered the unconscious, the field of psychoanalysis began to face problems, both as a professional field and as an academic discipline. Eisold tells the now familiar story: Psychoanalysis has fallen from its once dominant position in psychiatry and psychology. He quotes one researcher as opining, “Psychoanalysis is now on the fringe of scientific psychology, accepted