Research Digest

The Research Digest in this issue has four components. As usual, we have a Featured Article, a prominent recent publication, likely to be of special interest to most readers. Readers will be interested to see that a number of journals have recently dedicated entire issues to the relationship between psychoanalysis and neuroscience. As a “one-off,” this Research Digest reviews these Special Issues. This should serve to highlight the growing interest in neuro-psychoanalysis, as well as demonstrating that the topic seems to be blossoming in several locations around the world. In Neuro-Psychoanalysis: General we review several papers which give some impression of the range of work on neuro-psychoanalysis, and also work within, say, neuroscience that might be relevant to psychoanalysis (or vice versa). Finally, we have a special section on recent publications on the topic of Dreams, designed to match the theme of this issue of the journal.

Kandel, E. R. (1999), Biology and the future of psychoanalysis: A new intellectual framework for psychiatry revisited.  Am. J. Psychiatry,  156: 505-524. In Issue 1 of this journal we reviewed the controversial 1998 article by the eminent neuroscientist Eric Kandel, on the relationship between psychoanalysis and neuroscience. The American Journal of Psychiatry is reputed to have received more letters to the editor in response to this article than any other in its recent history. Six of these letters appeared in the publication of vol.  156, pp.  662-666 of the  Am. J. Psychiatry Four were extremely positive about the position Kandel had taken; however, one letter explicitly raised the question of whether biology had any relevance whatsoever to psychoanalysis, and Kandel (1999) fleshes out his (often radical) position on this issue in some detail, and with great clarity. First, Kandel's esteem for the overarching goals and approach of psychoanalysis cannot be questioned. For example, he argues that “psychoanalysis still represe