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…psychoanalysis still represents the most coherent and intellectually satisfying view of the mind.
In this special issue of the Psychoanalytic Review, in recognition of Kandel's service to psychoanalysis, it is fitting to cite in the epigraph to this paper his own tribute to psychoanalysis and to consider what he meant when he described psychoanalysis as “coherent and intellectually satisfying.”
In the light of other passages in the paper cited and its earlier companion piece (Kandel, 1998), I would surmise that, when describing psychoanalysis as “coherent and intellectually satisfying,” Kandel may have been referring to how psychoanalysis is open to the human condition in all its rich and varied complexity. We can say, without contradiction, that the method discovered and developed by Freud and those who came after him is notable for the wide-angle lens it directs at all that is human. It encompasses the classic triad of cognition, emotion, and motivation; adds to it consciousness, the unconscious, dreams, fantasies, the rational, and the irrational; extends it into psychopathology from everyday slips to neurosis and psychosis; and includes childhood, adolescence, and the nature of human relations in their sexual, loving, aggressive, and hateful conditions, even reaching across oceans in its efforts to include other cultures. No other branch of