"Bad" Mothers: The Politics of Blame Re: Radio Doug

[RE]

You're right, I left them out because I was thinking about, to again put it generally, psychologies that are more oriented to meaning and motivation, and in my working life I deal with c-b oriented people who never refer to Piaget and Vygotsky.  As I recall, Piaget was more oriented to the development of formal cognitive capacities, such as spatial orientation, but some of his work on object permanence -- e.g. when does a child grasp that objects endure when they are visually obscured by another -- have been of great interest to psychoanalysis.  Vygotsky seems to be something of an under-appreciated gold mine of similar investigations.  But they are really working in another area.  

One interesting and, I think, persuasive reading of cognitive psychology, or cognitive neuroscience, as some people are starting to call it, is that it is going through another 'revolution,'  the first having been to get them out of the doctrinaire foolishness of behaviorism.  This one entails acknowledgement of parallel psychological processing, and there's good evidence that something like the stratification of consciousness referred to by psychoanalysis has a physiological grounding.  For example, PET scans suggest that a response to a stimulus activates a variety of brain structures, structures which appear, in studies of patients who have suffered neurological damage, to be related to the ability to dream, and which is consistent with the idea that meaning is a synthesis of more and less conscious representations of the world and self.  This sort of work is very congenial to other studies that look at unconscious priming of memories -- there's empirical support for the transference.  In short, there's a lot going on that points to the possibility of a rapprochement between psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology.  In my view, it's going to be the cognitivists who end up being obliged to take the bigger step.

Randy 

  > cognitive-behavioral psychology, which began

  to entertain mental processes in the form of memory and cognitive

  processing. But c-b theory has very little comprehension of psychological

  development, as is evident in its essentially existentialist orientation to

  therapy. 

  This is mysterious. Cog psych isn't tied to therapy, it's explanatory. I used to do thsi stuff, and I can't recall a single figure in cog psych who looks at therapy issues. But developmental cog psych is a big area, indeed, the two founding figures of cog psych, Vygotsky and Piaget, were developmental psychologists by trade. jks

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