Foreword

Eric Kandel has had a lifelong interest in psychoanalysis, arising from his early relationship with the Kris family. This has been a great asset to psychoanalysis. I remember personally the enormous impact on the scientific standing and direction of psychoanalysis made by his articles “Psychotherapy and the Single Synapse” (1979) and “From Metapsychology to Molecular Biology: Explorations into the Nature of Anxiety” (1983). It was around that time that his work on the molecular neurobiology of memory was first coming to general public prominence. It was thrilling to discover that the same great mind that co-edited the monumental Principles of Neural Science (the first edition: Kandel, Schwartz, & Jessel, 1981) had a sympathetic interest in the theoretical propositions of Sigmund Freud. This feeling was greatly multiplied two decades later, when he published his masterly “A New Intellectual Framework for Psychiatry” (1998) in the American Journal of Psychiatry. This article attracted more Letters to the Editor than any previous article in the history of the journal, which prompted Kandel to write the follow-up article, “Biology and the Future of Psychoanalysis: A New Intellectual Framework for Psychiatry Revisited” (1999). This is where he famously wrote that Freud's models still provide “the most coherent and intellectually satisfying view of the mind” that we have (p. 505). The fact that Kandel went on to win the Nobel Prize for Physiology/Medicine in the following year (only the second psychiatrist in the history of the Nobel Prize ever to do so) cemented our good fortune. It was “official”: the leading authority in modern neuroscience had publicly acknowledged the ongoing value and relevance of psychoanalytic theory for the science of the mind.

There could have been no greater boost for the fledgling interdisciplinary field of neuropsychoanalysis, which formally came