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As gilbert long ago concluded, “Things are seldom what they seem,” and one might in attempting a summary of this volume note, even underscore, an intriguing present-day irony. Despite its political, academic, and economic ascendancy, “biological psychiatry” has yet to furnish us with data describing decisively the etiology, pathophysiology, and eradication of a single diagnostic entity (cf. Gold et al., 1988a, b). On the other hand, converging lines of evidence and derivative models from the laboratories of some the world's leading bench neuroscientists hold the now very real promise of explaining the basic nature, cause, and cure of “psychic conflict” and the character disorders it engenders.
More explicitly, current ideas and data from neurobiology, experimental psychology, and ethology can help us achieve three different but closely related objectives — first, the reconceptualization and even the laboratory investigation of such clinical and theoretical keystones as motivational processes, consciousness, and “the unconscious,” tasks which Hadley, Olds, and Wexler respectively undertake; second, the systematic and biologically sound reformulation of our understanding of symptom formation and therapeutic effect, ends to which Cooper contributes in his exploration of links between the fields of associative learning and psychoanalysis; and, finally, the placing of analytic technique on a solidly scientific foundation, a goal that Schwartz attempts to approach in his examination of affect, nonverbal communication, and determination of interpretive focus and timing.