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When I was doing a post-doctoral fellowship in mental health research 30 years ago there wasn't much going on that seemed to me to be terribly promising. Work with laboratory animals involved behaviours remote from the human condition while electrodes placed on the human scalp gave signals of such generality that it was not at all clear that anything useful could be learned from them. The only research that seemed at all interesting was the work with aphasic patients. I was quite intrigued by Norman Geschwind's patients among whom were people who could identify colours by matching them but they could not name the colour. Geschwind drew the conclusion that the patient's injury had left colour vision intact but had damaged the links between the auditory and visual cortex, the neural connections between hearing the name and seeing the colour. This kind of research actually seemed capable of unravelling some of the components of human mental functioning, perhaps even with relevance to the aspects of human mental life that seemed so much better elucidated by the methods of psychoanalysis.
By the time I became a clinician I had acquired quite a negative picture of research in the neurosciences. I had found it to be dull and ineffective, overly reductionist in attitude and method, in thrall to the physical sciences and the cult of quantitative measurement and dismissive of the far more interesting subject of psychoanalysis. The appearance of Nobel Prizewinner Francis Crick's elegy to reductionism The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (1994) did little to disabuse me of my feeling that by and large neurobiology was in bad hands.
But over the last two or three years, a fine informed critique of Crick's point of view by Mark Solms (1995), some fruitful conversations with Solms himself and two lectures by Allan Schore on the neurobiology of human emotion at the last Bowlby Memorial Conference convinced me that a new grouping of neuroscientists appreciati