ABSTRACT
There are many productive ways in which psychoanalysis and developmental science could interact, in a mutually beneficial manner, to fill in conceptual and methodological gaps in both. Psychoanalysis is much closer to the emerging neuroscience approach of embodied cognition than it is to traditional cognitive psychology. Some reluctance to address potential areas of confluence comes from the attitude that the different approaches to the emergence and functioning of the human mind operate at different levels of discourse. Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder impacting on a child's social, communication, and play skills. The revisionistic approach to the work of the giants of developmental theory would make them fully compatible with psychodynamic theory. Focusing on the fundamental psychoanalytic construct of the unconscious, J. Piaget contrasted the psychoanalytic mainstay as the "affective unconscious" with his own life work on the emergence of processes of thinking, which he called "the cognitive unconscious".
