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There is a desperate need for a book which will bring psychoanalysts up to date with recent progress in cognitive psychology. Neuroscience in general, and cognitive neuroscience in particular, is the branch of the natural sciences which has seen the most rapid advance of scientific knowledge over the past 15 years, with the exception perhaps of molecular biology and immunology. A dozen or so Nobel Prizewinners testify to this fact. Yet psychoanalysts persist in working with outdated psychological models which have much in common with behavioural formulations of animal learning put forward in the early 1950s and ill fit genuine psychoanalytic psychology (see Klein, 1976) ; (Spence, 1982). In fact, implicitly, although naturally not explicitly, psychoanalysts at times appear to subscribe to a 'black box' model of cognition, i.e. that one way or another conscious and unconscious feelings and thoughts come to be formed but the process by which they arise is not somehow a proper object of psychoanalytic enquiry. Needless to say, there have been many notable exceptions (Rapaport, 1951) and (Klein, 1970 to name but two). Currently, however, perhaps with the exception of Matthew Erdelyi (1985) and Morris Eagle (1984), few attempt to bridge the ever growing gap between psychoanalytic and neuropsychological models of the mind.
The above is not a prescriptive statement, rather a personal one. It may be that psychoanalysis would suffer rather than benefit from closer links with the natural sciences. It speaks to a need I feel and goes some way to explain my pleasure in picking up