Regional Bulletins

In recent years, neuroscientists have begun to investigate topics that traditionally have been the preserve of psychoanalysts (e.g., consciousness, unconscious mentation, dreams, affect, drive, psychopathology). The explosion of new insights into numerous problems of vital interest to psychoanalysis has not yet been reconciled and coordinated with existing psychoanalytic knowledge. Similarly, neuroscientists tackling these complex psychological problems for the first time have much to learn from a century of psychoanalytic inquiry.

What is needed is a rapprochement between researchers and clinicians belonging to these historically separate disciplines, a time and a place where they can learn about and enhance each other's perspectives and knowledge on matters of mutual interest.

These opening lines from Arnold Z. Pfeffer, Mark Solms, and Edward Nersessian's (1998) report in The American Psychoanalyst, Vol.  32(3), of the short but important history of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute's Neuroscience-Psychoanalysis Study Group could be read as a suitable declaration of the premises for all the study and/or research groups that have been initiated by different psychoanalytic institutes and groups around the world during the last decade. These groups, usually formed independently of each other, have mushroomed during the last years, and new ones are probably still being born as this goes to press. Neuro-Psychoanalysis therefore plans to publish regular reports from the groups, both as a way to broadcast the activities going on in different regions, and as an aid for establishing contact and promoting an interchange between the different groups and their members.

If you have already formed a group, but it is not included in the reports below, please contact me for the possibility of sending a report for the next issue. Some of the reports in this issue are reprinted, with permission, from The American Psychoanalyst.