Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

June 18, 1963. PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LEARNING THEORY. (Dr. Charles Brenner's Section of the Kris Study Group.) Drs. Bernard D. Fine, Felicia L. Landau, Edgar L. Lipton, John B. McDevitt, and Jacob E. Stump.

Dr. McDevitt called attention to the lack of a comprehensive theory of learning and outlined the scope, as well as the limitations, of the group's two-year endeavor. Data were gathered from various sources, viz., academic psychology, psychoanalytic theory, Rapaport's learning theory, clinical case material, Piaget's developmental psychology, and the role of speech and language in learning. Rapaport's definitions of learning seemed to offer the most profitable point of departure. He considers the following problems: how something perceived is turned into something retained; the occurrence of abiding changes wrought by experience, the laying down of quasi-permanent structures in the ego; how a process turns into a structure, i.e., the long-time survival and availability of experience. Thus, in discussing learning he takes into account the interaction between the individual and his drives, primary as well as secondary structures, and the environment, both physical and social. From this interaction, structure is laid down and modified through internalization and adaptation (in Piaget's terms, assimilation and accommodation).

The learning theories of the academic psychologists make no allowance for the genetic point of view. More encompassing and convincing elaborations of central or ego structures are found in the theories of Hebb and Piaget, but they are too limited in scope, devolving principally into schemata of intellectual development in which the instinctual drives figure not at all. It became apparent then that only a psychoanalytic theory would be broad enough to include all factors to be considered in the learning process. The essential ingredients of such a theory would have to include the drives, physical and social reality, autonomous ego functions