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Unlike many psychoanalysts in the United States, Arnold Cooper has maintained his involvement with psychiatry throughout his career. For many years he directed the educational programs in the Cornell University Medical School Department of Psychiatry. He has always maintained that there are bridges between the neurosciences and psychoanalysis that could mutually enhance the two fields. In 1985 he published a much-cited paper, “Will Neurobiology Influence Psychoanalysis?” In his role as North American editor for the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, he played a key role in developing a regular feature that would explore that interface.
In this chapter I would like to explore the potential for an integrated view of personality that takes into account data from both neuroscience research and psychoanalytic observation. Another area of Arnold Cooper's interest lies in character pathology, where he has made major contributions to our understanding of narcissistic and masochistic personality disorders (Cooper, 1982a; 1984a; 1985c; 1986a; 1993; Groopman & Cooper, 1995). Hence this particular bridging effort encompasses two of Arnold Cooper's lifelong interests.
For many years the psychoanalytic theory of character evolved independently of genetic and neuroscientific data. Psychoanalytic clinicians in our current era must take into account the information gleaned from studies