A Psychoanalyst's Reflections on Rereading a Cognitivist: Toward an Explanatory Theory of Relationship

Psychoanalysis was born at a time when it was taken for granted that the psyche coincided with the conscious mind—that is, with what was accessible to introspection—while consciousness was understood, also self-evidently, as a “natural” capacity of every human being, constituting indisputable proof of the unitary character and identity of the individual. It was held, too, that introspection could be communicated to others, through the medium of words, provided that the individual had sufficient mastery of verbal language. Both conceptions were bound up with a concept of memory that is now totally obsolete.

Against this philosophical and cultural background, psychoanalysis discovered the existence of psychic processes that were not conscious, and, having “discovered the unconscious,” dedicated itself primarily to the aim of exploring it. This had two consequences. First, on the theoretical level, the Freudian system, centered as it was on the concept of repression and on metapsychology, sought to explain how and why there were unconscious processes; second, for clinical purposes, interpretation was considered to be the instrument whereby the unconscious could be made conscious. In this way psychoanalysis bound itself inseparably to “words”—that is, to the means of communication