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In the next century, biology is likely to make deep contributions to the understanding of mental processes by delineating the biological basis for the various unconscious mental processes, for psychic determinism, for the role of unconscious mental processes in psychopathology, and for the therapeutic effect of psychoanalysis. Now, biology will not immediately enlighten these deep mysteries at their core. These issues represent, together with the nature of consciousness, the most difficult problems confronting all of biology—in fact, all of science. Nevertheless, one can begin to outline how biology might at least clarify some central psychoanalytic issues, at least at their margins.
When a serious neuroscientist like Eric Kandel speaks respectfully of psychoanalysis, not only validating the idea of unconscious mental processes (in and of itself, an unusual thing), but also advocating the possibility, desirability, and even necessity of linking these processes with biological mechanisms (which few had believed possible, desirable, or necessary, up to that point!), the world takes notice. His landmark essays “A New Intellectual Framework for Psychiatry” (1998) and “Biology and the Future of Psychoanalysis: A New Intellectual Framework for Psychiatry Revisited” (1999), the latter reprinted in this issue, have been cited 900 and 722 times, respectively, as of December 2011, according to Google Scholar. His statement that “psychoanalysis still represents the most coherent and intellectually satisfying view of the mind” (1999, p. 505) is quoted frequently in lectures, and whenever it is quoted, once can practically hear the speaker's relief and joy that someone of Kandel's stature made such a statement.