In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind

by Eric R. Kandel

believe more strongly now, that biology may be able to delineate the physical basis of several mental processes that lie at the heart of psychoanalysis—namely, unconscious mental processes, psychic determinism (the fact that no action or behavior, no slip of the tongue is entirely random or arbitrary), the role of the unconscious in psychopathology (that is, the linking of psychological events, even disparate ones, in the unconscious), and the therapeutic effect of psychoanalysis itself. What particularly fascinated me, because of my interest in the biology of memory, was the possibility that psychotherapy, which presumably works in part by creating an environment in which people learn to change, produces structural changes in the brain and that one might now be in a position to evaluate those changes directly.