The Introduction makes a case for reuniting memory studies and affect studies: like twins separated at birth, these two vibrant fields of in the study of Renaissance literature and culture have existed alongside each other, in spite of their conceptual entanglement, since antiquity. An overview of recent developments in contemporary theorizations of memory and affect is followed by an investigation of how they might be connected in the historical frameworks of early modern faculty psychology, Galenic humoralism, and, to use a modern term, distributed cognition.

The excitement of cognitive psychology as a viable paradigm for contemporary research and application developed from a number of trends deeply imbedded in psychology’s past. In the twentieth century, these influences were clearly evident among the functionalists, the Gestalt movement, Tolman’s purposive behaviorism, as well as in the extended subfields of psychology, such as developmental, social, personality and clinical. In the latter part of the twentieth century, such specified advances as Bartlett’s schema theory, Hebb’s neural networks, and Broadbent’s filter model of attention provided cognitive psychology with substantive direction. The question of artificial intelligence contributed to a paradigm shift through the efforts of pioneers such as Turing and the logical theorist studies of Newell, Shaw and Simon, leading to what is described by some as the cognitive revolution. The seminal research of George Miller, Jerome Bruner, and Ulric Neisser gave cognitive science its form and substance. The question of the sustainability of the cognitive paradigm remains a topic for reflection.

Kendler’s chapter provides a compelling account of how little evolved important premises of twentieth- and twenty-first-century psychopathology concepts represented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals (DSMs) are from frameworks developed in earlier centuries that came to the fore in the nineteenth century, emphasizing a categorical distinction between cognition and emotion in characterizing broad classes of disorders. He then poses questions about how the recent NIMH Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative relates to that heritage. The present commentary similarly places RDoC in that tradition yet differentiates RDoC from the DSMs. By design, RDoC is nonreductionistic and initially much less comprehensive and much more research based, largely confining its substantive elements to intersections of well-developed psychological constructs (important in but not confined to) psychopathology with well-developed psychological and biological data. As such, RDoC is much better positioned to support and drive recently growing interest in computational psychiatry.

During the development of psychiatric nosology during the nineteenth century, faculty psychological systems, often proposed by philosophers, played a substantial role in the development of psychiatric diagnostic systems. The most important of those faculties proposed were cognition and emotion. Because patients often displayed dysfunction in multiple faculties, alienists had to understand how these faculties interrelated. To address this question, nineteenth-century psychiatric diagnosticians postulated causal relationships based on folk criteria of understandability (although longitudinal observations were also utilized). This history puts efforts to apply hard reductionist models to the resulting psychiatric diagnostic categories in a conundrum. The naïve inductivist view of the origins of our psychiatric diagnostic categories – that they arose from raw observations by great skilled clinicians of the past – is untenable. Rather, the road from clinical observations to diagnostic categories passed through both theories of mental functioning (aka faculties) and hypotheses of mental causation between different disordered faculties.