Mind Meets Brain: Integrating Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience

As we enter the 21st century, we leave the Decade of the Brain and embark upon the exciting Decade of the Mind. During the next 10 years, basic neuroscience and clinical research will lead to a scientific understanding of how our minds work. The Human Genome Project has served as a stimulus to an explosion of fantastic studies in molecular genetics and cellular neurobiology. Clinical research contributions include psychotherapy, neuroimaging, and psychopharmacology studies.

What are some of the things we have learned? Psychotherapy appears to have the same beneficial effect for some psychiatric illnesses as a medication that was developed to treat that illness. For most if not all illnesses that require psychiatric medications, a combination of psychotherapy and medication is more effective than medication alone. At a more basic level, we know that new neuronal pathways are established as a result of a psychotherapeutic process. Memory is an extremely complex process involving multiple locations and pathways in the brain. Neural circuits are being mapped and related precisely to affects and behavior. Recent findings suggest that new cortical brain cells are grown throughout the life cycle and may be associated with short-term memory.

When it comes to understanding the relationship between the mind and the brain, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience have many similar interests. An incomplete list includes affect, consciousness, unconscious states, dreaming, memory, mental development, impulses and their inhibition, perception, pleasure, instinct, thinking patterns, and response or lack thereof to cognitive and/or psychopharmacologic interventions. This year’s annual meeting will bring together experts from psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience, as well as other fields, to teach us their latest findings and to what extent they are able to integrate findings from basic neuroscience with clinical research and practice.

I am extremely excited about the range and quality of the lectures, courses, forums, and symposia presented by outstanding individuals that Phil Muskin, M.D., and the Scientific Program Committee have assembled. Eric Kandel, M.D., this year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize in medicine, will present the Marmor Award Lecture early in the program on Monday, May 7. That afternoon I will chair the Presidential Symposium, “The Royal Road Revisited: Dreams in the 21st Century,” with a distinguished panel consisting of Drs. Morton Reiser, Mark Solms, Eve Caligor, and Harold Blum. The Presidential Forum on Tuesday will be focused on “Confidentiality and Medical Record Privacy in the 21st Century.”

Mark Solms, Ph.D., from London will also discuss sleep and dreams as part of the International Psychiatrist Lecture Series. The Frontiers of Science lecturers include Robert Sapolsky, Ph.D., lecturing on genetics and psychiatry; Gerald Edelman, M.D., and Giulio Tononi, M.D., on consciousness; Edith London, Ph.D., on neuroimaging and substance abuse; and Michael Gershon, Ph.D., on the neurochemistry of the GI tract.

You will be blown away by Latanya Sweeney, Ph.D.,’s lecture demonstrating the ease with which the Internet, databases, and computers can be used to invade an individual’s privacy. Ray Kurzweil, Ph.D., who invented and developed speech-recognition programs for computers, will dazzle you with his predictions about our thinking being communicated to computers and computers being used to alter our cognition in the not-to-distant future.

The Convocation of Fellows on Monday evening gives us a chance to honor colleagues and others for their contributions to our profession and our patients. Part of the evening events include the William C. Menninger Memorial Award Lecture, which will be given by Harrison H. Schmitt, a former astronaut and former senator from New Mexico. His lecture is titled “A Trip to the Moon and Beyond.”

Ed Foulks, M.D., and his wife, Janice, have made outstanding arrangements, offering the widest array of leisure time activities that I can recall from any meeting I have attended. There is something for everyone: restaurants, shopping, fishing, golfing, cultural activities, and 53 tours of New Orleans and the surrounding areas! Cooking classes will help you bring home some of the wonderful Cajun and Creole meals. Early arrivals will be able to experience the Heritage and Jazz Festival (Original article: see page 39) in addition to traditional jazz venues. No visit is complete without a stroll through the French Quarter and down Bourbon Street.

Attendees will come away from this meeting with a stimulating educational experience and exposure to a rich cultural heritage in a wonderful, historic setting. I look forward to welcoming you to New Orleans. ▪