You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Some 14 years ago now, a preeminent neuroscientist with a longstanding interest in psychoanalysis and derivative psychotherapies reopened in rather dramatic fashion a line of inquiry that Freud early on (1895) had envisioned, explored, but then abandoned as premature. In a 1978 lecture to a Harvard audience, Eric R. Kandel (1979) suggested that because of advances in basic research the time had perhaps arrived to begin again to sketch connections between data relating to information-dependent neural plasticity and the cellular neurobiology of learning, on the one hand, and, on the other, clinical findings about the origin of and the psychological treatment of neurosis and character disorder.
Since the time of Kandel's first formal steps toward interdisciplinary integration, the psychiatric and psychoanalytic literatures have expanded to include many additional attempts to meld insights from laboratory and consulting room. The five essays in this issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry both review the progress to date and, more relevantly, continue to show how data and concepts from cellular neurobiology, experimental psychology, ethology, and cognitive science may illuminate long-familiar clinical phenomena and observations.
More specifically, David Cooper traces the explicit and implicit role associating learning concepts have had in the theories and procedural recommendations of analysts from Freud onward.