Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience: Imagination and the Meaningful Brain. By Arnold H. Modell. Cambridge:  MIT Press, 2003,  271 pp., $35.00.

In this deceptively small book Arnold Modell demonstrates for us his erudition and wide-ranging knowledge of the classics, philosophy, philosophy of science, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, art, music, and of course psychoanalysis. I can touch here on only a few of the issues he raises.

Modell sets for himself an enormous task. In fact, his final paragraph can be read as a challenge to the rest of us to replicate and extend what he attempts in this volume: “As a final observation on the mind-body problem, I turn again to the moderating voice of the philosopher Thomas Nagel. The mind-body problem is, in his opinion, still unsolved. What is required for its solution, he suggests, is a radical revision in our concept of the mind, a radical alteration in how we conceptualize mind. It requires an unimagined expansion of the concept of mind that would simultaneously include neural events. Mental states have a ‘tripartite essence—phenomenological, functional, and physiological.’ It is an illusion to conceive of these aspects separately” (p. 203). Unquestionably, Modells's work is an attempt to realize that vision.