ABSTRACT
This chapter is a personal and informal ethnography of the subcultures of psychoanalysis and experimental psychology. In 1897, W. H. R. Rivers was appointed to the first post in experimental psychology at Cambridge. Experimental psychology is, in its better exemplars, cumulative, and strong enough to support various kinds of technology, which is the most straightforward criterion of a successful natural science. A psychology of individual subjectivity may always be as problematic as psychoanalysis. There are psychoanalysts like Bowlby who would be at home in a department of experimental psychology; there are experimental psychologists like Keith Oatley who are at home in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is full of theory. Experimental psychology is dominated by convergent thinking, so, of course, psychologists have difficulty with a type of thought that is divergent in every respect, whose basic method, free association, is the paradigm of divergent thinking.
