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In 1998 the Contemporary Institute of Psychoanalysis and Trans-disciplinarity was founded in Porto Alegre, which is the capital of the southernmost Brazilian State, Rio Grande do Sul, with 9 million inhabitants. It is an important center, equidistant from Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo.
One of the founders of the Contemporary Institute, Dr. Cesar Bastos, invited Maria Sonia Goergen, a neuropediatrician (with years of interest in the frontiers of brain-mind) to coordinate the Department of Transdisciplinarity. Maria Sonia, Beatriz Zimerman (speech therapist), and Mauricio Marx Silva (psychoanalyst), elaborated a study program of neuroscience and psychoanalysis for the students. Marcio Noronha (an anthroplogist) and Cristiano Goergen Portner (a sociologist) joined the group and later Alamo Pimentel took over Marcio's seminars. During the last few years we have been increasingly involved in discussing teaching methods. Also we have ourselves had much to learn from physics. For nearly two years we have had meetings with Rita de Almeida and Marco Idiart to discuss complex adaptive systems, trying to link in a consilient way the different approaches to the brain.
The First International Neuro-Psychoanalysis Congress in London, 2000, and the second in New York, 2001, assured us we were on the right track. After the last meeting in New York we were able to take another step toward presenting an introduction of our group. There is a growing interest among other colleagues who wish to join us and we have started monthly meetings to study topics of interest.
It is as difficult to break through the orthodox view in the local psychoanalytic community as it is to deal with differences inside any interdisciplinary group. The concept of concilience (cf. Edward Wilson Concilience—The Unity of Knowledge) has been used. Each member of the group consults the literature (Antonio Damasio, Edgar Morin, Mark Solms, Jaak Panksepp, Oliver Sacks, etc.) trying to transmit the knowledge t