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No one of sound judgment would have doubted, a century ago, that the human mind is very much a product of the human brain. And yet, throughout the twentieth century, two fields of inquiry that aim at, respectively, understanding mental operations and elucidating the workings of the brain were kept separate, were deemed to be irreconcilable, and were largely seen, by practitioners of the other field, as misguided pursuits.
That such a rift came to pass, opening a near abyss between psychoanalysis and what came to be known as neuroscience, is very strange from today's perspective and difficult to imagine, except perhaps for the few who may still cling to the idea that the two disciplines are not parts of the same general endeavor. It is strange indeed when one thinks that the creator of psychoanalysis began his career by cultivating both brain science and neurology, and it is even stranger when one realizes that the very architecture of mental processes proposed by Freud was literally grafted on to knowledge he had gathered about human neuroanatomy and about the presumed neural functions associated with major structural divisions—the brainstem, the limbic cortical circuitries, and the phylogenetically more modern frontal cortices.
Strangeness notwithstanding, the rift did take place, and it is only fitting that one of the strong voices heard against the separation came from someone who, as in the case of Freud, has cultivated the two fields of inquiry, psychoanalysis and neuroscience. That is the case of Eric Kandel, whom this issue of the Psychoanalytic Review is meant to honor, and who came to his practices in the reverse order of Freud's.
Similarity of goals aside, psychoanalysis and neuroscience are