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The term “cognition” has Cartesian overtones which fall harshly on the psychoanalytic ear. Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. The refutation of this naive rationalism has been one of the major themes of modern Western civilization. Freud believed that psychoanalysis had dealt a final coup de grâce to such philosophizing. Nevertheless, we find that cognition is the central preoccupation of contemporary psychology. Are we to understand this as yet another example of resistance to the painful discoveries of psychoanalysis, or are we faced with something really new, an approach to the human mind from which psychoanalysis may be able to learn?
The question is rhetorical, of course. Cognition no longer has the limited meaning of conscious thought. As it is used by the contemporary psychologist it refers primarily to the silent and invisible processes which underlie, support, and maintain the surface manifestation of conscious mental activity. In psychoanalytic terminology this would include all of the activities of the executive ego which normally take place outside conscious awareness. Psychologists have learned the lesson from psychoanalysis that by far the greater part of mental activity is unconscious.
What is new in psychology is the application of this insight to the adaptive functioning of the executive ego. Psychoanalysts have devoted their attention for the most part to the two aspects of unconscious mental activity directly opposed in neurotic conflict, the defensive operations of the ego and the ego-alien impulses said to originate in the id. Analysts have been aware of the existence of a “conflict-free” sphere of ego activity at least since Hartmann called their attention to it in 1939. But with few exceptions they