As an experimental cognitive psychologist who has long been interested in problems raised by such American theorists as Chomsky, Lenneberg, Fodor,

Bever, and others, Mehler presents an overview of the development of academic psychology and draws certain parallels in psychoanalytic thinking. He cites the extensive research carried out by his group at the Centre National des Recherches Scientifiques in Paris concerning learning and memory in the newborn and in very young children. His findings have been important in indicating the linguistic sensitivity of the newborn and young children. He has delineated a shift from global to analytic memory, a shift which, he feels, must be linked to the acquisition of linguistic activity. He draws some conclusions concerning childhood amnesia and the use of different coding schemata before and after the period between the ages of three and six. He hopes for a closer interdisciplinary collaboration between psychoanalysis and contemporary cognitive psychology to further such research on language.