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One strenuous night last week, when I was in the stage of painful discomfort in which my brain works best, the barriers suddenly lifted, the veils dropped, and it was possible to see from the details of neurosis all the way to the very conditioning of consciousness. Everything fell into place, the cogs meshed, the thing really seemed to be a machine which in a moment would run of itself.
Psychoanalysis has a long tradition of adopting new ideas and methods from other sciences and disciplines. In recent years, with the growth of the multidisciplinary arena of cognitive science, increasing reference has been made to this field in the psychoanalytic literature. There has been discussion of cognitive psychology (Holt, 1964) and its experimental findings (Erdelyi, 1984), and of information theory (Rosenblatt and Thickstun, 1977; Peterfreund, 1980), artificial intelligence , and computer modelling (Wegman, 1985). Extensive contributions have been made by writers interested in the cognitive unconscious (Bowers and Meichenbaum, 1984; Eagle, 1986), and in the juxtaposition of cognitive science and psychoanalysis (Pfeifer and Leuzinger-Bohleber, 1986; Colby and Stoller, 1988; Horowitz, 1988).
Work on the relationship between psychoanalysis and cognitive science is, however, at an early stage, and that which has been done demonstrates disparate views of the nature and value of both psychoanalysis and cognitive science. There is as yet no unifying conceptual framework within which to situate this relationship.
In this paper, I wish to compare and contrast psychoanalysis and cognitive science by exploring the different models of the mind that each has adopted. It is argued that this approach provides an