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As psychoanalysts turn to the neuropsychological brain, we find ourselves also connecting with the empiricism of experimental psychology, and this book seems to be an attempt to create a dialogue between psychoanalytic clinicians and the psychological laboratory. It is not an easy one to read, but it is thought-provoking. Unfortunately, it is somewhat disconnected, consisting of a few rather brief articles and one extended piece that should really be a book of its own. The authors of each of the chapters undertake to present an overview of a great deal of literature, and they try to explain experimental situations clearly and relate them to clinical work. However, the language of the psychological laboratory is sometimes abstruse and laden with statistics. In addition, there seems to be a tendency in the experimental literature to reduce even rather short phrases to capitalized initials, and the accumulation of acronyms sometimes makes for difficult reading.
The contributors to this collection are all psychologists with training both in research and in psychoanalysis, and they relate their laboratory and clinical work. Nevertheless, I was left with unanswered questions about the congruence between the object of the experimental studies and the processes I deal with in the consulting room. It is not easy to take concepts that have grown up in the consulting room into the laboratory, and some of the difficulties in that transition are evident in these articles. Is the clinical “psychoanalytic unconscious” the same thing as the “cognitive unconscious” that appears in the laboratory?
In their introduction Bornstein and Masling review the history of the unconscious in experimental psychology. They inform us that the existence of unconscious mentation has been controversial among experimental psychologists. Research has focused on implicit perception and learning, on attempts to operationalize and study defensive processes, on mental representations, and on the differences