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Cognition is associated with the conscious, not with the unrecoverable unconscious; with knowing, thinking and perceiving, not with feeling, willing, and doing; with the human animal, not with the animal animal; with human social environment, and not with the biological and the instinctual. There is a growing preoccupation of students of man with cognition. In the forefront of this interest in cognition is Silvano Arieti, with his many contributions to our understanding of cognition, beginning in 1947, and continuing to the present with such studies as those on schizophrenia, the intrapsychic self, creativity, and depression. Although Aaron Beck recently wrote (1976) on Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders, he makes little use of Sullivan.
Sullivan's interest in language and thought began with a paper published in 1925 on “Peculiarity of Thought in Schizophrenia” (1962). He updated his ideas on this topic in 1939, when he presented, also to an American Psychiatric Association meeting, a brief, but exceedingly clear, succinct article on the language of schizophrenia (1964a).
Cognition is a term used at various levels of abstraction and pertains to processes which differ from one another. Therefore I will discuss its meanings further, in order to understand their relation to Sullivan, and also to the ways in which I perceive the role of cognition in Sullivan.
Psychology and philosophy before Freud recognized that conscious awareness was divisible into three categories, namely, knowing, feeling, and willing. Although unconscious knowing,