ABSTRACT
The incompatibility between the cognitive science and psychoanalytic approaches is partly one of content. The cognitivist models turned out to be helpful ways to describe phenomena that were of little interest to psychoanalysts. Criticisms of classical cognitive psychology are, of course, almost as old as the subject itself. In identifying the common ground between developmental science and psychoanalysis, they point to the understanding of modern-day cognitivists of mind as embedded in the physical experiences that have created it and that continue to closely link cognition and affect. The "Enactive Mind" (EM) is embedded in social interaction and changes itself in response to this interaction. The EM framework implies a number of profound epistemological changes that move developmental science closer to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was never comfortable with the closed domains of computational models, in which elements to be studied can be fully represented and defined.
