ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines a view in which cognition and the organization of experience is the core of the development of personality and the root of the disorders of living that concern psychoanalysis. Interpersonal theory especially, with its operational approach, its concern for the structuring effects of language, its detailed examination of the structure and organization of experience, and its insistence on defining the intrapsychic in terms of interpersonal experience, focused the approach to the central and architectonic nature of cognition in the study of psychoanalytic psychology. Post-Freudian psychoanalysis implied a shift from a psychology of drives in which meaning was seen as appetitive and motivations were defined as functions of drives, to a psychology of self and character in which meaning is experiential and both motives and intentionality derive from meaning and the organization of experience. The post-Freudian revisionists of the 1940s were re-confronting an early problem in psychoanalytic theory development.
