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“Mental derangement is a disordered state of the function of the brain, arising from some existing morbid action in that organ… and which must be remedied before the alienation can be removed.”
The pace of research into the biological as well as the hereditary/constitutional underpinnings of the various psychiatric disorders has been so brisk in the recent years as to render a complete coverage of the area too daunting and too lengthy for one journal article. For this reason I have chosen to focus on some of the highlights related to the realms of neurophysiology and psychology that at the same time reshape our thinking about conditions that we confront as psychoanalysts. Some of the recent research has a direct bearing on psychoanalytic theory and practice, both in regard to the common “symptom disorders” of DSM's Axis I and the personality disorders of Axis II. Other research findings have a less immediate connection to psychoanalysis, yet contain tendrils, as it were, that make their way into our field in ways that are at once silent and surprising.
Consider, for example, a recent observation concerning twins reared apart. One such pair, when discovered, were noted to have had the same recurrent dream, even though they had grown up in very different circumstances and had never known each other. Had both of these twins been undergoing analysis, their analysts would have elicited the day