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Starting with Freud, there always have been (some) analysts much concerned with the fit of psychoanalysis, as a natural science of the functioning of the mind, into the whole body of the biological natural sciences concerned with the functioning of the brain as the bodily organ providing the organic substrate of mental functions and with the body within which the brain plays out its co-ordinating and executive roles. As is so well known, Freud abandoned the quest for a neurologically grounded and explained mental apparatus out of the clear deficiencies of the neural science knowledge of his day though he never abandoned his conviction that the discovery of the precise chemical (hormonal?) carriers of the instinctual mental energies lay just around the corner, nor—some would assert—his continued reliance, through the hidden structure of his metapsychology, upon the very natural science assumptions and the model-building derived from them, that had powered the original more explicit efforts of his 'Project for a Scientific Psychology' (1895). (See in, this connexion, the book by Pribram & Gill, 1976, ) (and that by Sulloway, 1979.)
Morton Reiser is among the small group of analysts who are today trying to follow through on the belief that the time is now ripe, in terms of the matured neurobiology of the 1980's, for a fresh look at the possibilities for a true convergence of contemporary clinical psychoanalysis and the new neurobiology. His is not a philosophical effort. All the time-honoured and longstanding philosophical questions of the nature of the mind-brain or mind-body relationship have been simply bypassed, or better yet, taken for granted. In Reiser's one philosophy of science aside (in a footnote on page 16), he simply states: 'For the dialectical materialist (at least my sort of dialectical materialism) the firing of hypothalamic cells is anger; that is, "anger" and the "firing of particular cells" are statements that describe the same phenomenon at d