Considerações Interdisciplinares: Psicanálise e Psicologia Cognitiva

Abstract

The concept of unconscious, central in the psychoanalytic theory, has been critized by most of the experimental psychologists in the History of Psychology. Psychoanalysis had been mainly considered a personality theory about emotional development and hidden motifs in the mental pathologies and dreams, and not working with cognition. But Psychoanalysis should also be considered a cognitive theory, as expressed in The Interpretations of Dreams, and in the works of close colaborators to Freud, as Ferenczi. The experimental analysis of the role of the day residues in the elaboration of dreams, conducted inicially by Pötzl in 1917, opened a new field of research. In the 50's many researchers began to work with subliminal perception (subception) in psychoanalytic bases. Nowadays, there is a crescent interest in the cognitive study of the unconscious, that may be considered a integrating concept.