The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves

by Eric R. Kandel

with some notable exceptions, psychoanalysts have not embraced the last fifty years’ worth of knowledge about the biology of the brain and its control of behaviour. If psychoanalysis is to regain its intellectual power and influence, as it should, it will need to engage constructively with the new biology of mind. Conceptually, the new biology could provide psychoanalysis with a scientific foundation for future growth. Experimentally, biological insights could serve as a stimulus for research, for testing specific ideas about how brain processes mediate mental processes and behaviour. Imaging studies have provided evidence that psychoanalysis, as well as other forms of psychotherapy, is a biological treatment – it actually produces detectable, lasting physical changes in the brain and in behaviour. Now we need to find out how.