Is Cognition the Key?: Commentary by Michael M. Saling

Carlo Semenza argues that psychoanalysis and cognitive neuropsychology share certain assumptions, or at least share some metatheoretical notions. At first this comes as something of a surprise. Cognitive neuropsychologists often claim the Wernicke–Lichtheim tradition as an important root of their discipline. If Freud's well-known critique (Freud, 1891) is taken as a significant milestone in the development of psychoanalysis, then Semenza's position loses plausibility. The centers and fibers approach of the Wernicke–Lichtheim model has little in common with the cerebral field approach adopted by Freud. The positions of psychoanalysis and cognitive neuropsychology on the question of emotion are also profoundly different. Psychoanalysis does not recognize a boundary between emotion and cognition, and is able, therefore, to move seamlessly between them. In consequence, psychoanalysis does not (and indeed cannot) attach different epistemological values to emotional and cognitive domains. Cognitive neuropsychology, by its very nature, accepts (and promotes) a deep distinction between that which is deemed to be cognition and that which is considered to be emotion. Semenza reflects this when he suggests that cognitive neuropsychologists suspended the study of emotional processes in the interests of developing an objective study of human information processing. He suggests further that emotional variables were to be reinserted at some suitable point in the future. There is a clear implication that the emotional domain has a lower epistemic status than cognition, and that it can be added and subtracted from mental function without significant loss of meaning. This attitude, in turn, must have a systemic influence on the discipline of cognitive neuropsychology that renders it quite different from psychoanalysis.

It is often said that Freud devoted himself to psychology because the neurology of his day was too primitive for the development of a true neuropsychology. Semenza wond