Eric Kandel is living Sigmund Freud's life in reverse: Freud moved to Vienna as a child, grew intellectual roots in neuroscience, and became an illustrious psychoanalyst, whereas Kandel left Vienna as a child, grew intellectual roots in psychoanalysis, and became an illustrious neuroscientist. In these inspiring essays the mature Kandel expresses a hope that young Freud shared for the solution of some persistent mysteries of the human mind by combining studies of individual psychology with brain research.

These eight essays by Eric Kandel, the Nobel-prize winning psychiatrist and neuroscientist, provide an eloquent, finely elucidated map of his journey from psychiatric resident to the most profound contemporary thinker about the relationships among psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience, and how they can facilitate each other's dynamic growth. Kandel's exquisite sensitivity to the humanistic appeal and challenge of the psychotherapeutic encounter and the treatment of the mentally ill, and his unique and comprehensive knowledge about the development and function of our ever changing nervous system, which must be understood at multiple levels of organization, from the gene to the level of mind, is captured in pellucid prose. This is a must read for the clinician, the neuroscientist, as well as the intelligent reader who would understand brain and behavior.

Eric Kandel, the greatest psychiatrist-neurobiologist of the past half-century, cracked open the 'black box' of the neural mechanisms of learning and memory. His work and what has flowed from it has implications for psychiatry which parallel those that the breaking of the genetic code had for the field of molecular biology. The conceptions and framework which developed from the work of Kandel will provide key underpinnings of psychiatry for the next half century. Every aspect of our field, from theory to therapeutics—psychodynamic, behavioral, pharmacological—has gained from his approach. In this important and inspiring volume, some of Kandel's key integrative and forward looking papers related to the intersection of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and neurobiology have been reproduced with thoughtful commentaries and perspectives by leaders in American psychiatry and behavioral science. A tour de force. Magnificent!

In Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and the New Biology of the Mind, Eric R. Kandel M.D., invites the reader to accompany him on one of the most important, relevant and exciting journeys of our era: how he has used his own superb mind to explore how the minds of all of us work. We are guided on this intimate and exciting excursion not only by Dr. Kandel but also by other prominent pioneers in the investigation of the human mind, in both function and dysfunction. This path of discovery takes unpredictable twists and routes from pre-World War II Austria, where Eric Kandel was born, to Dr. Kandel's formative, psychoanalytically-oriented experiences in medical school and his psychiatry residency at Harvard's Massachusetts Mental Health Center, to his research training at the National Institute of Mental Health, to Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he has been studying for three decades the molecules in the brains of the sea snail, Aplysia californicus. Dr. Kandel's personal, intellectual, and academic excursion represents the progress and potential of the fields of psychiatry, psychology and the behavioral sciences in integrating the understanding of mind and brain towards the purpose of helping those among us who suffer from mental disorders. As such, I recommend Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and the New Biology of the Mind as mandatory (albeit, altogether enjoyable) reading for all mental health professionals and for anyone else wishing to understand where science is taking us in the understanding the role of the brain and biology in mental processes and the human condition.