The Interplay of Genes, Environments, and Psychoanalysis

We begin the 2008 JAPA Research Sections with a window onto a realm of contemporary research that holds great, but as yet almost completely untapped, value for psychoanalysis. In our featured paper, Suzanne Haddad and her colleagues serve as welcome guides to the rapidly expanding world of gene and environment research (“nature-nurture interplay”)—an interdisciplinary domain currently being pursued with stunning innovation, vigor, and energy (see Kendler and Prescott 2006; Rutter 2007; Torgeson 2006). The great promise—in both findings and methods—of the new genetics studies has been recognized, often with well-deserved fanfare, by our colleagues in psychiatry, neuroscience, and the behavioral sciences (e.g., Caspi et al. 2002, 2003; ). Haddad and colleagues now cogently argue for yet another new bridge—from the insights of behavior genetics studies to psychoanalytic perspectives and interventions.

In recent years, papers addressing neuroscience interfaces with psychoanalysis and other disciplines—social cognition, developmental psychology—have appeared in JAPA and elsewhere (see, e.g., Gerber and Peterson 2006, in press; Mayes 2003; Peterson et al. 2007; Roffman and Gerber 2008). With rare exceptions (e.g., Mayes 2003), contemporary research addressing genetics and human development, personality, psychopathology, and environmental experience has received scant attention in psychoanalytic quarters. This benign neglect is not surprising, in light of genetics studies' inherently complex constructs and methods, and their vocabulary, so unfamiliar to most psychoanalysts and mental health researchers.

These dissemination and translation difficulties are compounded, as Hadddad correctly notes, by the fact that most genetics studies involve abstract constructs applying to classes of variables, use large samples, and address but a few key dimensions. These features of genetics studies stand