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Our Group has now, in 2006, been meeting for five years. The Group is connected to the University of Toronto Epilepsy Research Program and has a strong interest in brain mechanisms, clinical neurological syndromes, and psychological trauma. Both clinical and research people attend.
The meetings tend to alternate between basic science and clinical presentations, generally from a classical psychoanalytic framework. Correlations between brain mechanisms and meta-psychological categories have been a fruitful stimulus for many lively discussions. (For example, Helen Mayberg gave a series of talks on candidate anatomical substrates for ego, id, and superego a few years ago, and more recently we looked in detail at a patient struggling with a growing brain tumour who actually became more integrated and expressive, more related to the family, as the tumour progressed in size.) The goal has been to enrich our knowledge, integrate the two disciplines of neuroscience and psychoanalysis, question critically the evidence, and, hopefully, develop a deeper understanding of patients and a more helpful approach, especially to those who are very ill.
In a series titled “Anxiety and Epilepsy: A Developmental Synthesis” presented to the Group and at other University venues, Dr. Jim Deutsch outlined how epilepsy has served as an intense focus for both neurology and the mental health fields in the study of paroxysmal events and of their potentially profound impact on the personality development and functioning of the individual.
The recent Annual Meeting of the American Epilepsy Society in Washington, in December 2005, devoted significant attention to behavioral, cognitive, and emotional problems in children, both prior and subsequent to the first appearance of thek seizures, and suggested common underlying abnormalities. In other words, seizures may be just one of a number of possible manifestations of some brain process common to all. In an attempt to integrate the various factors operati