Lost in Cognition

This book examines the pretensions of the new paradigm in psychology that has put itself forward as the model for the future of the clinical disciplines, thereby seeking to put paid to psychoanalysis. What is this paradigm shift? It goes by the name of cognitive-behaviourism. Where does it come from? From the United States. Until the nineteen-sixties, behavioural psychology had enjoyed a certain prestige in the US. It was later disqualified by the objections from the linguist Noam Chomsky who held that no learning procedure could ever account for linguistic ability. This ability was surely innate, Chomsky argued, and so he set about hunting out the organ of language. Behaviour had to be complemented by a machine for taking cognisance, a machine that was innate and which conformed to the post-Chomskyan model. It took the discipline some thirty years to deck itself out in new clothes. The advances in biology, in neurology, and in the nebula that resulted from them under the 'neuroscience' label, oversaw this change.

Eric Laurent

ABOUT THE AUTHORPREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION Loss and cognitionPART I: HOW IS THE SUBJECT INSCRIBED? CHAPTER ONE Chomsky with Joyce CHAPTER TWO Neural plasticity and the impossible inscription of the subjectPART II: IMPOSSIBLE EVALUATION CHAPTER THREE Collective expert-assessment and compared clinical trials: a machine run amok CHAPTER FOUR The psychopathy of evaluationPART III: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND COGNITION CHAPTER FIVE On the origin of the Other and the post-traumatic object CHAPTER SIX The cul-de-sac of cognitive psychoanalysis CHAPTER SEVEN Cognition and transference in psychoanalysis todayEPILOGUE The new pathways of loss in the DSM-5 impasseREFERENCESINDEX