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Consciousness, Freud (1923) wrote, is "our one beacon-light" (p. 18) for approaching the understanding of unconscious mental processes and thereby a systematic explanation of mind. If not the one and only beacon light, consciousness must still be taken as one essential bearing in navigating an approach to the study of mind-brain interaction. In the absence of the subject's conscious report, one could not, for example, demonstrate changed "average evoked response" wave shape when the same vertical line is perceived as the letter l rather than the number 1, as E. Roy John describes in this volume. The dependence of neurobiological research on knowledge of conscious subjective experience is not always so obvious and, during the strongly behaviorist era in this country, that dependence went unacknowledged. The editors tell us that "only within the past decade has the subject of consciousness been reestablished as a legitimate area of central concern in the behavioral sciences" (p. 1).
In accord with the title, there is a rigorous effort throughout this volume to coordinate and anchor psychological processes in their neurophysiological substrates. Any advance in such knowledge should be welcome to the psychoanalyst. It is, however, one matter to assume that any such advance further defines the function of the brain and the function of the mind and the interaction between brain and mind. It is quite another matter to assume, as at least some of the contributors to this volume seem to do, that such an advance obviates the difference.
One does not avoid dualism, as Ballenger and I (Smith and Ballenger, 1981) have attempted to show, by simply naming a field of inquiry "psychobiology" or by writing—as Richard Davidson does here—that "all brains exist within a cultural … nexus" (p. 36). We need not, I believe, lament—as does Julian Davidson (pp. 282, 287)—dualism as a temporarily necessary, but unfortunate, handicap to thought. It should be understood that to enter into