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During its first 100 years, psychoanalytic theory has been influenced by myriad forces from within and outside the discipline. Some of these influences have been purely scientific (Fisher & Greenberg, 1996); others have reflected social, cultural, and political change on a broader scale (Torrey, 1992). Three sources of scientific influence have had a particularly strong impact on contemporary psychoanalytic thinking.
First, psychoanalysis has been profoundly affected by ideas and findings from developmental psychology (Masling & Bornstein, 1996), particularly studies of infancy and early childhood (Shapiro & Emde, 1995). Increasingly, this influence has been bidirectional, with psychoanalytic concepts affecting developmental models nearly as much as developmental work has influenced psychoanalysis. Moreover, as researchers have begun to delineate a lifespan perspective on maturation, growth, and change, they have turned to psychoanalytic theory to provide a context for conceptualizing successful and unsuccessful aging (Galatzer-Levy & Cohler, 1993).
Along somewhat different lines, many psychoanlysts have sought to refine and extend psychoanalytic theory by linking psychoanalytic concepts to ideas and findings from contemporary neuroscience. In some instances theorists and researchers have tried to connect key features of psychoanalytic theory (e.g., repression) directly to activities of the brain and nervous system (Hobson, 1988; Winson, 1985). In other instances neuropsychological findings have been used to test seemingly unrelated