By way of personal revelation, and perhaps a felt sense of guilt and a reason to recuse myself, it is necessary for me to say that Professor Weinberger is my oldest professional friend; and, a fellow traveler from a shared beginning that had a common origin in our dissertation related research based on the paradigm of an academic-clinical psychoanalyst, the late NYU Professor of Psychology Lloyd Silverman, to our current positions as clinical-empirically focused psychologists.
Like others of our generation, hatched in the cultural Donnybrooks of the 60s and 70s, through to the current chaos of dismantling yet again the often-hapless enterprise of scientific culture. We were and are intimately informed by psychoanalytic history; and, influenced but set off on the roads less taken by many others. I bequeathed my tachistoscope and best wishes to Joel, and the fruits of his labors that are briefly reviewed in his paper.
Like several of the invited authors in this volume, as well as Dr. Richards, the author of the issue's theme itself, Professor Weinberger's paper enumerates the specific ways in which psychoanalysis has both developed and fallen short of its collective vision. In short the reason is, too much focus on the narrative and not enough on integrative, programmatic science. For the reader and or beginning or mature scientist, Professor Weinberger's paper is a close to exhaustive referencing of the tributaries of paradigmatic, scientific research on unconscious processing ranging from neuroscience to cognitive perceptual psychology, under all the generative terms it is now pursued by. This paper and Professor Weinberger's comprehensive text on research on the unconscious, is not only a handy catchup for those who would like to pursue this avenue that Freud opened up, but a link to research that couldn't be done at the time Freud turned from his “Project for a Scientific Psychology”, to the route of a more empirical examination of the possibilities of his patients' clinical narratives of embedded and embodied, but mysterious mental suffering.