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Until recent years the field of cognitive development played a very limited role in psychoanalytic thought. Although certain cognitive concepts have always been a part of psychoanalysis, these have been used mainly in reference to symbolization in symptoms and distortions in dreams.” The study of cognitive life as recognized by academic psychologists was considered to be too superficial or too removed from basic motivating forces to exert any real effect on development.

In addition, the early years of psychoanalysis were primarily devoted to the demonstration of the existence of unconscious life, infantile sexuality, and psychic determinism—against massive opposition—so that such topics as cognitive development had to await easier times. Nevertheless, any system of psychology as far-reaching and comprehensive as psychoanalysis could not entirely ignore cognitive factors, and Freud did attempt to formulate a theory of thinking. According to this model, mental excitation flowed from sensory structures to the motor process that discharged the excitation.