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Psychoanalysis is, presumably, one of those theories which has been combined with most other theories, and there are only a very small number of theories or thought systems which haven't tried to use psychoanalytic insights. Some-times, these attempted syntheses approach the limits of what is possible; at other times, the compromise lies far from both psychoanalysis and those conditions on which the synthesis is established. Sometimes, it is more obvious that there should be something to achieve, for example when we talk about synthesizing psychoanalysis with certain cognitive processes and certain aspects of cognitive psychology. If psychoanalysis is also going to be a general psychology (besides a clinical one) describing every aspect of the mind, it has to integrate cognitive processes such as perception, memory and thought processes. In the light of Freud's own development, it is significant that his most extensive discussion of cognitive processes is in Project for a scientific psychology (written in 1895), and that we here are dealing with a text which Freud later on did everything to prevent being published. “Project for a scientific psychology” is not only a text which deals with cognitive processes, it is also a text which takes neu-rophysiology and neuropsychology as its starting point. Apart from a relative short period in the 1970s, it was not until the 1990s that neuropsychology and cognitive psychology (and particularly the combination of the two) obtained a strong foothold.
Vesa Talvitie's “The Freudian unconscious in the context of the cognitive orientation” is a contribution to the integration of psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology. The thesis contains serious attempts to reformulate certain psychoanalytic core concepts in the terminology of cognitive psychology. The condition for this is, however that the concept of the unconscious must be abandoned. In a theoretical context, the concept is identical with neurophysiological processes, and the co