Cognition and Psychotherapy (PDF)

For almost three millennia, philosophy and its more pragmatic offspring, psychology and the cognitive sciences, have struggled to understand the complex principles reflected in the patterned opera­ tions of the human mind. What is knowledge? How does it relate to what we feel and do? What are the fundamental processes underlying attention, perception, intention, learning, memory, and conscious­ ness? How are thought, feeling, and action related, and what are the practical implications of our current knowledge for the everyday priorities of parenting, education, and counseling? Such meaningful and fascinating questions lie at the heart of contemporary attempts to build a stronger working alliance among the fields of epistemology (theories of knowledge), the cognitive sciences, and psychotherapy. The proliferation and pervasiveness of what some have called "cognitivism" throughout all quarters of modern psychology repre­ sent a phenomenon of paradigmatic proportions. The (re-)emergence of cognitive concepts and perspectives-whether portrayed as revo­ lutionary (reactive) or evolutionary (developmental) in nature-marks what may well be the single most formative theme in late twentieth­ century psychology. Skeptics of the cognitive movement, if it may be so called, can readily note the necessary limits and liabilities of naive forms of metaphysics and mentalism. The history of human ideas is writ large in the polarities of "in here" and "out there"-from Plato, Pythagoras, and Kant to Locke, Bacon, and Watson.