Point/Counterpoint—A Forum for Discussion of Reviews and Books Reviewed

Not Taking the Evidence Into Account: Kihlstrom Responds to Shevrin's Comments

John F. Kihlstrom
Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkley

I am well aware of Shevrin's work in this area, beginning with his provocative early studies of subliminal perception using the “rebus” technique, up to his most recent electro-physiological studies of what all cognitive psychologists recognize as negative priming. The question is whether we need psychoanalytic theory to explain his experimental results. In my view, we do not, and nothing in Shevrin's contribution to Empirical Perspectives on the Psychoanalytic Unconscious by Robert F. Bornstein and Joseph M. Masling (1998) convinced me that anything is gained by using the psychoanalytic concept of “cathexis” when the ordinary concept of “attention” will do just fine.

With all due respect to the eminent neuroscientists quoted by Shevrin, the discovery of subcortical brain centers controlling sexual and aggressive behavior in rats does not validate the Freudian theory that unconscious sexual and aggressive impulses lie at the heart of all we humans do; and there is certainly nothing about the habituation of the gill-withdrawal reflex in aplysia that warrants reference to Freudian theories of mental architecture. Frankly, I do not understand how anyone could find a theory so riddled with contradiction and tautology “coherent,” or a theory so completely lacking in scientific support “intellectually satisfying.”

Psychology owes psychoanalysis a great debt for preserving an interest in both conscious and unconscious mental life during the dark age of behaviorism. But we owe Gestalt theorists the same debt. The fact is that the cognitive revolution would have happened anyway, without psychoanalysis; and when cognitive psychology rediscovered the unconscious, it did so without benefit of psychoanalytic theory. No aspect of unconscious mental life discovered by contemporary cognitive psychology requires explanation in psychoanalytic terms, or provides any empirical support for psychoanalytic theory. Cognitive psychologists do their own field a great disservice by pretending otherwise, even for the sake of good collegial relations.

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Reference

Bornstein, R. F., & Masling, J. M.. (1998). Empirical perspectives on the psychoanalytic unconscious. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

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PsycCRITIQUES
0010-7549	© 2000 by the American Psychological Association
Previously published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, April 2000, Vol. 45, No. 2, 235-236

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