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The title of Eric Kandel's latest book offers a double reference to the intentions of the author: on one side is a brilliant attempt to capture the dynamic level of exchange between science and art that existed in Vienna from 1880 until the exodus of Austrian artists and scientists prior to the Anschluss with Germany, and on the other is a wish to introduce the lay reader to the new level of insight that contemporary neuroscientists have about the relation of the brain to psychic experience.
With astonishing erudition, from the history of art through to medicine and psychoanalysis, Kandel traces the evolution of neurology from the late 19th-century research hospitals of Europe to our contemporary “age of insight” and the 21st-century prospect of a new level of appreciation of the relation between mind, brain, and body.
The research of neuroscientists such as Oliver Sacks (2010), R. V. Ramachandran (2012), Michael Gazzaniga, J. LeDoux (2002), and Francis Crick (1994), among others, have culminated in an ever-increasing tide of books that aim to show the lay reader what the title of Steven Pinker's (2001/2009) book boldly stated: How the Brain Works.
While philosophers such as John Searle, Thomas Nagel, and Paul Churchland continue to debate the borderline between brain and consciousness, neuroscientists are predisposed to support the philosophical position of Daniel Dennett, whose book Consciousness Explained was one of the first comprehensive overviews of the field, that consciousness has indeed been explained.
Unlike many neuroscientists, however, Kandel has retained his deep and long-held belief that Freud's work constitutes an immensely important foundation for this new science. In Kandel's view, Freud's speculative theory of the relation between conscious and unconscious process, the use of a topology of psychic activity that distinguished between “I,” “it,” and “Over-I,” was scientifically justifiable because the scientific instruments that Freud might have used t