Customer Reviews

Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Science: Multiple Code Theory, A

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Dr. Bucci's book is a thoughtful integration of Cognitive Science and psychoanalytic thinking. The book is obviously for those who are in the field or are students of the field. She explains basic concepts in Cognitive Science and psychoanalysis in a lucid manner. She is a creative thinker who attempts to cast off what cannot stand up well in light of current science but shows how much of psychoanalysis can stand up better than many critics think. The chapters on her research were not as strong as the theoretical chapters, as she was not clear on what her complex coding system should expect to see in various situations. She has done much more research since the book was published and interested readers would do well to follow up this book with her research articles.

As noted by other reviewers, Bucci's theories are complex and a background in the history of academic and clinical psychology, as well as psychoanalysis, are helpful to appreciate them. Also as noted by another reviewer much research has been done using Bucci & Maskit's computerized discourse measures of The Referential Process since this book was published 13 years ago. More recent work has demonstrated the validity of these measures against Bucci's definitions in empirical studies as well as validating these measures against measures of temporal sequences in narratives and measures of episodic memory. Some of this work is outlined at the Web site below along with summaries of Bucci's main theoretical ideas:

[...]

Though Bucci's ideas and research have developed since this book was first published it remains the single most comprehensive source that outlines her arguments in the context of the history of these diverse fields.

Bucci writes a great deal about what she calls Referential Activity, the ability to put experience into symbols and words in a specific and concrete way. But the book itself shows little RA, with page upon page of densely jargon-backed theoretical discussion, and almost no concrete examples of the highly abstract and difficult concepts presented. This makes it almost impossible to understand much what Bucci is saying without an extensive background in both cognitive science and psychoanalytic theory, a background few share. Morever, Bucci seems to take her integration too far, combinbing the work of cognitive science authors and perspectives that are strikingly incompatible without really dealing with this incompatibility. Cognitive science, like psychoanalytic theory, is a pluralistic, even anarchistic group of heterogenous voices, hardly the kind of unified front that Bucci often seems to want it to be.