Cognition in Psychoanalysis*

In a paper published in 1965 in Volume VIII of Science and Psychoanalysis, edited by Masserman, I wrote, “Cognition is or has been, up to now, the Cinderella of psychoanalysis and psychiatry. No other field of the psyche has been so consistently neglected by clinicians and theoreticians alike. Isolated studies and manifestations of interest have not so far developed into a definite trend.” (Arieti, 1965) Since then the attitude of the profession has changed, but, until recent years, only to a modest degree. For a person like me, who wrote his first paper on cognition in the year 1947, these thirty-two years of waiting have been a taxing experience, but not a “waiting for Godot.” Now cognition has become a growing stream of study and concern. And yet, if some colleagues who have not been interested in this subject were to ask me to define cognition and then hear my answer, they would feel like Moliere's famous character, Mr. Jourdain, who, when his teacher explained what prose was, said, “I spoke prose all my life without even knowing it.” Similarly, even those of us psychoanalysts who have not been interested in cognition have done cognitive psychoanalysis every day, during every session, because cognition is the study of ideas and their precursors, that is, the study of the development, formation, content, interconnections, and dynamic effect of ideas. It is through ideas that we communicate with our patients; it is by hearing the content of their ideas that we get to know them and to know what ideas do to them. It is through ideas that we bring about improvement and cure. In the present paper, cognition will not be discussed as a medium by which we get to know and represent reality — this is the usual representation made by academic psychologists — but as a major