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October 28, 1985. PSYCHOANALYTIC AND NEUROBIOLOGIC VIEWS OF ANXIETY AND PANIC: ALTERNATIVE OR COMPLEMENTARY CONCEPTS? Morton F. Reiser, M.D.
Dr. Reiser discussed his book, Mind, Brain, Body: Toward a Convergence of Psychoanalysis and Neurobiology. Our present challenge in science, he stated, is in determining whether psychoanalysis and neurobiology, each with its own language, concepts, and methods for understanding mental and behavioral processes, have something to say to one another. The challenge rests on the creation of a new "Rosetta Stone" which can articulate the questions and answers of brain function investigators (whose subjects are the body, matter, and energy) with those of psychological explorers (whose subjects are the mind and meaning). Such articulation requires rules of translation to map necessary, sufficient, and exclusive correlations at each level. Only then will science benefit from an empirically developed "dual-track approach" that follows data in each domain separately and in its own terms; only then will we be able to realize the potential that each discipline has to stimulate the other. The goal is to evolve more constructive methodologies and to ask yet more relevant questions in the process of exploring the age-old dilemmas of the mind/body dichotomy. Neither field supplies completely satisfactory explanations; each should work to complement and enrich the other.