Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and the New Biology of Mind

This volume gathers eight essays by Eric Kandel, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist, and prints two of his American Journal of Psychiatry papers next to the commentaries they drew from analysts and researchers. Kandel treats psychotherapy as a biological treatment: learning alters the expression of genes and the strength of synaptic connections, so the work of an analysis leaves physical traces in the brain. He holds that talking therapy and medication act on the same neural circuitry, and he presses psychoanalysis to state its claims in forms that can be tested.

For a clinician working psychodynamically, the worth lies in a mechanism for why interpretation and the therapeutic relationship produce lasting change, described without collapsing the encounter into chemistry. Kandel supplies terms for setting analytic practice beside neuroscience rather than in retreat from it, and a research programme of imaging and outcome measurement that he urges the field to adopt. The reprinted exchanges let the reader follow how neuroscientists and clinicians argued the case in real time.