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The last five years in particular have seen the publication of numerous works which attempt to relate the ideas and discoveries of experimental psychology to psychoanalysis.
This rapprochement with psychoanalysis, which is able to explain a wide range of psychological phenomena, is an expression of a drastic change of direction in the field of experimental psychology. Until 1960 the American scene was dominated by behaviourism, which left no room for theories that gave interpretations of mental processes or took the existence of the unconscious seriously.
Cognitive psychology's approach to the study of the mind is quite different. First of all it regards human behaviour as too complex to be explained by a simply structured theory as Miller, Galanter and Pribam assert in Plans and Structures of Behavior . Secondly, cognitive psychology maintains that the structure of the mind should not only be described on the basis of actual behaviour. Thirdly, in what is undoubtedly its most revolutionary development, this psychology acknowledges the existence of a vaste number of mental organisations and structures that are inaccessible to the conscious and thus it has started to deal with the question of unconscious processes.
This book is part of this new approach. In many ways it is a curious and amusing work, even though it deals much more thoroughly and clearly with academic psychology than with psychoanalysis.
What is new about this book compared to other works is that the author does not set himself the task of proving one theory or the other right, but rather he tries to find correlations between cognitive psychology and Freudian theory by backing the latter up with psychophysiology. Although this intention is in itself very interesting, it is nevertheless riddled with pitfalls, which the author sometimes manages to avoid brilliantly and skilfully