Click Here to Read: Healthy Minds Across America Forums (September 24 2008).
Thought the following report of the recent “Healthy Minds Across America” forums would be of some interest. The wave of the recent past (from the 1990’s as certain technological advances in neuroimaging, microarrays, etc. have taken place) and future in science and psy chiatry is to identify molecular processes which impact on the neural structure/function correlated with symptomatology, e.g., mood dysregulation, anxiety disorders, psychosis, etc.
This integration of molecular biology and psychiatry was initiated by the early work of people such as Steve Hyman (former director of NIMH now at Harvard), Eric Nestler, Eric Kandel, etc. This radical reductionistic approach, from my perspective, must be balanced by interdisciplinary research and attention to subjectivity/intersubjectivity (something all three of these distinguished scientists would agree on).
Because of interdisciplinary research, we now know that Alzheimer’s disease is faciliatated by degrees of loneliness (which, from my perspective, grants psychoanalysis a potentially therapeutic role-as in all of the following), aging of cells (teleomeres-partially providing stability to chromosomes- shorten with high levels of perceived stress), shrinkage (atrophy) of neural tissue in prefrontal, temporal, hippocampal, etc. regions as a function of childhood maltreatment (emotional, physical, sexual abuse and neglect), etc.
Psychoanalysis can help facilitate this kind of transdisciplinary research, in the depth of its understanding of the neurosubjective in a variety of psychiatric and medical disorders.
Brian Koehler