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More than a hundred people attended the Katan Symposium, presented in September 1997 by the Katan Treatment Center of the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Society. In “Understanding the Emotional Brain: The Neurophysiology of Human Experience,” Daniel Siegel and Allan N. Schore focused on the reciprocal link between relationship-based experience and physical development of brain. Norman Clemens and Kay McKenzie discussed Seigel and Schore's work.
At Columbia we have been energetically pursuing an interdisciplinary approach to understanding neighboring scientific disciplines relevant to our own interests. In order to help organize this effort we have established a major committee devoted to organizing the integrative activities, including study groups, course work, and outreach programs.
We now have a 28-session course in the fourth year curriculum which includes classes on the neurobiology of memory, affect, cognition, and consciousness, and related topics such as representation, fantasy, dreams, semiotic systems, and language. The underlying concept is that mental processes rest on a foundation of a hierarchy of biological systems. We have realized that the world of biological research is so vast and the information coming is so massive that we need to develop specialties even as analysts with interdisciplinary interests. So, the course is done in a modular way; we have three sessions on memory with one group of teachers, three sessions on affect with another group, etc.
Our course on child development is being redesigned, so that it includes some of the information from the laboratories of developmental research and child observation. And, we have begun introducing clusters of sessions, distributed through the four-year core curriculum, on scientific process and critical thinking, as well as research methods and their evaluation.
There are also informal discussion an