Unconscious Communication: Communicative Psychoanalysis and Subliteral Cognition

Behavioral scientists in general, and cognitive researchers in specific, are reticent about venturing into the discipline(s) of psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, in this article I would like to selectively connect psychoanalysis to academic psychology. I think this is important for both fields. For psychoanalysis, cognitive research can provide much-needed constraints on unbounded psychodynamic theorizing; for cognitive psychology, certain aspects of psychoanalytic theory can inform cognitive research, making it more “user friendly.”

This article links the work of the psychoanalyst Robert Langs, founder of the new school of psychotherapy called communicative psychoanalysis (Langs, 1996, 1995, 1993, 1992), to my own cognitive/linguistic methodological research (e.g., Haskell, 1978, 1991) that I have termed subliteral (S_ub L) or anagogic cognition and communication. I will also suggest that the methodology provides support for Langs' clinical findings of what he terms “derivatives” (D_eRvs). The link between the work of Langs and myself is unconscious (Unc) linguistic narratives. What Langs terms “derivatives” is an Unc form of communication generated by a patient to a therapist. It should be noted, however, that the Unc being referred to by Langs and myself is neither the Unc of classical nor neo-Freudian theory, nor of mainstream cognitive psychology. Langs's Unc is a perceptual unconscious (p_erUnc) that perceives external events and reasons about them prior to conscious recognition. In short, Langs p_erUnc is a sophisticated cognitive Unc.

Needless to say, the theory of a p_erUnc has engendered considerable controversy. Neither psychoanalytic theories nor cognitive science theories support the existence of such a p_erUnc. Although, in principle, psychoanalytic theory is more amenable to a p_erUnc, mainstream cognitive science, based on computational and connectionistic frameworks, is not. The idea of a cognitive unconscious, however, was suggested by Piaget (1973, see also Ha