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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>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. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>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.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Randy</FONT> </DIV>
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<P>> cognitive-behavioral psychology, which began<BR>to entertain mental
processes in the form of memory and cognitive<BR>processing. But c-b theory
has very little comprehension of psychological<BR>development, as is evident
in its essentially existentialist orientation to<BR>therapy.
<P>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</P>
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