Morton F. Reiser. Mind, Brain, Body. Toward a Convergence of Psychoanalysis and Neurobiology.  Basic Books, New York, 1984,  228 pages. Price unknown.

Morton Reiser's book can be considered as part of a cultural movement which aims at placing psychoanalysis firmly within the modern scientific world. I think it is significant that the attempt to do so has been carried out by someone who until recently was President of the largest psychoanalytic society in the world. The attempt has been made from a biological perspective and thus in this respect it represents a return to the origins of psychoanalysis.

Today such an undertaking could have better chances of success than it did when Freud attempted it, thanks both to the progress made in modern neurobiology, and to the discarding of those reified metapsychological concepts which made it impossible to make psychoanalysis and biology tally. So far so good, and I am in complete agreement with the Author. So much so that I would like to pause here to say that I hope the book will soon be translated into Italian, for it is written with admirable clarity, clinical insight, and is authoritative in the fields of both neurobiology and psychoanalytic theory. Thus although there are significant aspects of the way with which the Author deals with the theme which I don't agree with, I find it quite difficult to say what they are. However, the problems raised are too important to be ignored. The Author sets out to consider those data of a neurobiological nature which provide analogies or links with the clinical phenomena of memories or selective forgetting, of the relationship between ideas and feelings, of signal-anxiety. These analogies are studied through what the Author calls the dual-track approach, which consists in studying separately but in parallel the data pertaining to the individual