Cognition and Psychoanalysis

Modern Cassandras, both lay and professional and too numerous to cite, continue to proclaim the imminent demise of psychiatry. Psychoanalysis is not spared these dire predictions. Authorities within psychoanalysis have expressed grave concern about the future of analysis both as a psychotherapeutic method and a corpus of psychological and psychopathological theory. “Psychoanalysis is in danger,” Dr. P. J. van de Leeuw stated at the recent 31st Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association in New York. Nor is it true that psychoanalysis is only in peril as a method of treatment — it is also in decline in the intellectual community. Psychoanalytic theory is an untidy confusion of many tongues but little communication and understanding, a veritable Tower of Babel. In a recent symposium of the American Psychoanalytic Association it was stated that the more analysts seem to know, the more they know they don't know. There are also wide discrepancies between traditional theories of psychoanalytic psychology and actual analytic practice; these apparently have not disconcerted or embarrassed many classical Freudian practitioners. And so the melancholy tale goes on without surcease.

Both contributing to and a result of the conflict between theory and practice has been the neglect given cognition by analytic practitioners and theorists. The primary contributors to the understanding and investigation of cognition have been philosophers and psychologists. It was the developmental psychologist Heinz Werner who pointed out that the orientation toward (and the capacity for) knowing is the essential, irreducible characteristic which has helped man to evolve from animal to human being. Why have we neglected such an important aspect of man until recently?

All observation is not only theory-laden, but also Weltanschauung-infused. Analytic formulations obviously reflect the intellectual climate of their period. Analysis developed during the Machine Age. During this intellectual