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That mind, consciousness, human experience, and subjectivity emerge out of the developing and organizing neurobiological matrix has become the shared focus of neurologists, neurobiologists, and psychoanalysts in the recent decade Edelman, 1992; Levin, 1991, 1997). Interdisciplinary work on neural development and anatomic localizations have given credence and vigor to psychoanalytic developmental models; the unquestionable facts that we live in our bodies and that our sense of self is rooted in a period well before language begins have been further deepened and enriched by recent research exploring the interplay of mind and brain.
That brain plasticity is constant until death, that brain cells are not, as we were taught, given in fixed numbers like eggs in the ovary at birth, that brain cells are altered by their physiologic environment (why identical twins are never identical) is exciting news indeed. These emerging neuropsychological concepts and explanations root psychoanalysis in modern neuroscience and enhance its legitimacy as a technique for personality transformation.
All experience alters brain function. For example, Position Emission Tomography (PET) scans reveal different areas of the brain activated by focused episodic memory–the kind of recall of detailed past experience that is used in history taking and by random episodic memory–the uncensored, spontaneous thinking that occurs in psychoanalytic work (Andreasen et al., 1995). PET scans done after successful psychotherapy, cognitive and behavioral, for obsessivecompulsive disorder look the same way as scans done after beneficial use of antidepressant medications (fluoxetine), and both kinds of treatment, talk and meds, produce diminshed cerebral metabolic rates for glucose in the caudate nucleus (Baxter et al., 1992; Schwartz et al., 1996). A recent report compared serotonin levels using complex brain imaging techniques in two matched young men with personality disorders and depression. Both men had very l