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From the beginning psychoanalysis has been a forum for new, innovative, challenging, and at times scandalous ways of understanding human behavior. Through constant questioning of established psychoanalytic paradigms, psychoanalysts continue to challenge accepted knowledge and stretch therapeutic capabilities. Although extremely exhilarating the embracing of new ideas can evoke fears over abandoning what is known. In giving up the ambivalent comfort of the familiar and venturing toward the new, we risk isolation, rejection, indifference, or anger from those to whom we wish to stay connected. Still the excitement of the new discovery propels us forward. An understanding community that encourages growth allows for the interdependent fertilization of its members. The Academy is and has been such an institution. Its members fall into the category of innovators who believe in pursuing their work honestly, in earnest, and wish an open mind.
From birth on we interrelate with our environment. Our complex brain structure codifies our experience according to parameters available to us through our interaction with the other. Through the theory of neuronal group selection, Edelman (1992) explains how this interplay between environment and the interaction of neuronal circuits and reentrant pathways provides us with intentionality and meaning. The brain has the capacity to organize both external and internal stimuli in perceptual categorizations. The connection between these perceptual categorizations creates conceptual categorizations that give rise to primary consciousness located in the present. The constant feedback between this