In Search of Memory

Kandel braids two stories: the making of a science and the making of a scientist. Born in Vienna in 1929, he fled the Nazis as a boy, trained in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, then turned to the nerve cells of the sea slug Aplysia to ask how a memory is physically laid down. That work traced learning to lasting changes at the synapse and earned him the Nobel Prize in 2000.

For a psychodynamic clinician the value lies in his refusal to leave analysis behind. Trained in it himself, Kandel holds that psychoanalysis still offers the most coherent account of mind available, and that its claims about the unconscious and early experience can be tested at the level of cells and circuits. He shows how experience alters gene expression and synaptic connection, a material picture of how relationship and repetition reshape a person. The book makes its case for dialogue between consulting room and laboratory, not the absorption of one by the other.