Am J Psychiatry 156:4, April 1999 505
Special Article
Biology and the Future of Psychoanalysis:
A New Intellectual Framework for Psychiatry Revisited
Eric R. Kandel, M.D.
The American Journal of Psychiatry has received a number of letters in response to my
earlier Framework article (1). Some of these are reprinted elsewhere in this issue, and I
have answered them briefly there. However, one issue raised by some letters deserves a
more detailed answer, and that relates to whether biology is at all relevant to psychoanaly-
sis. To my mind, this issue is so central to the future of psychoanalysis that it cannot be ad-
dressed with a brief comment. I therefore have written this article in an attempt to outline
the importance of biology for the future of psychoanalysis.
(Am J Psychiatry 1999; 156:505 524)
We must recollect that all of our provisional ideas in
psychology will presumably one day be based on an or-
ganic substructure.
—Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism” (2)
The deficiencies in our description would probably
vanish if we were already in a position to replace the
psychological terms with physiological or chemical
ones.…We may expect [physiology and chemistry] to
give the most surprising information and we cannot
guess what answers it will return in a few dozen years of
questions we have put to it. They may be of a kind that
will blow away the whole of our artificial structure of
hypothesis.
—Sigmund Freud, “Beyond
the Pleasure Principle” (3)
During the first half of the twentieth century, psy-
choanalysis revolutionized our understanding of men-
tal life. It provided a remarkable set of new insights
about unconscious mental processes, psychic deter-
minism, infantile sexuality, and, perhaps most impor-
tant of all, about the irrationality of human motiva-
tion. In contrast to these advances, the achievements of
psychoanalysis during the second half of this century
have been less impressive. Although psychoanalytic
thinking has continued to progress, there have been
relatively few brilliant new insights, with the possible
exception of certain advances in child development
(for a review of recent progress, see references 4–7).
Most important, and most disappointing, psychoanal-
ysis has not evolved scientifically. Specifically, it has
not developed objective methods for testing the excit-
ing ideas it had formulated earlier. As a result, psycho-
analysis enters the twenty-first century with its influ-
ence in decline.
This decline is regrettable, since psychoanalysis still
represents the most coherent and intellectually satisfy-
ing view of the mind. If psychoanalysis is to regain its
intellectual power and influence, it will need more than
the stimulus that comes from responding to its hostile
critics. It will need to be engaged constructively by
those who care for it and who care for a sophisticated
and realistic theory of human motivation. My purpose
in this article is to suggest one way that psychoanalysis
might re-energize itself, and that is by developing a
closer relationship with biology in general and with
cognitive neuroscience in particular.
A closer relationship between psychoanalysis and
cognitive neuroscience would accomplish two goals
for psychoanalysis, one conceptual and the other ex-
perimental. From a conceptual point of view, cognitive
Received Oct. 22, 1998; revision received Feb. 16, 1999;
accepted Feb. 19, 1999. From the Howard Hughes Medical Insti-
tute and Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, Departments of
Psychiatry and Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, Columbia
University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Address reprint
requests to Dr. Kandel, 722 West 168th St., New York, NY 10032.
In the course of working on this article, I have benefited greatly
from insightful discussions with Marianne Goldberger, who also
gave critical comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. In addi-
tion, I have received helpful suggestions from Nancy Andreasen,
Mark Barad, Robert Glick, Jack Gorman, Myron Hofer, Anton O.
Kris, Charles Nemeroff, Russell Nicholls, David Olds, Mortimer
Ostow, Chris Pittenger, Stephen Rayport, Michael Rogan, James
Schwartz, Theodore Shapiro, Mark Solms, Anna Wolff, and Marc
Yudkoff.

506 Am J Psychiatry 156:4, April 1999
INTELLECTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR PSYCHIATRY
neuroscience could provide a new foundation for the
future growth of psychoanalysis, a foundation that is
perhaps more satisfactory than metapsychology. David
Olds has referred to this potential contribution of biol-
ogy as “rewriting metapsychology on a scientific foun-
dation.” From an experimental point of view, biologi-
cal insights could serve as a stimulus for research, for
testing specific ideas about how the mind works.
Others have argued that psychoanalysis should be
satisfied with more modest goals; it should be satisfied
to strive for a closer interaction with cognitive psychol-
ogy, a discipline that is more immediately related to
psychoanalysis and more directly relevant to clinical
practice. I have no quarrel with this argument. It seems
to me, however, that what is most exciting in cognitive
psychology today and what will be even more exciting
tomorrow is the merger of cognitive psychology and
neuroscience into one unified discipline, which we now
call cognitive neuroscience (for one example of this
merger see reference 8). It is my hope that by joining
with cognitive neuroscience in developing a new and
compelling perspective on the mind and its disorders,
psychoanalysis will regain its intellectual energy.
Meaningful scientific interaction between psycho-
analysis and cognitive neuroscience of the sort that I
outline here will require new directions for psycho-
analysis and new institutional structures for carrying
them out. My purpose in this article, therefore, is to
describe points of intersection between psychoanalysis
and biology and to outline how those intersections
might be investigated fruitfully.
THE PSYCHOANALYTIC METHOD AND
THE PSYCHOANALYTIC VIEW OF THE MIND
Before I outline the points of congruence between psy-
choanalysis and biology, it is useful to review some of
the factors that have led to the current crisis in psycho-
analysis, a crisis that has resulted in good part from a re-
stricted methodology. Three points are relevant here.
First, at the beginning of the twentieth century, psy-
choanalysis introduced a new method of psychological
investigation, a method based on free association and
interpretation. Freud taught us to listen carefully to pa-
tients and in new ways, ways that no one had used be-
fore. Freud also outlined a provisional schema for in-
terpretation, for making sense out of what otherwise
seemed to be unrelated and incoherent associations of
patients. This approach was so novel and powerful
that for many years, not only Freud but also other in-
telligent and creative psychoanalysts could argue that
psychotherapeutic encounters between patient and an-
alyst provided the best context for scientific inquiry. In
fact, in the early years, psychoanalysts could and did
make many useful and original contributions to our
understanding of the mind simply by listening to pa-
tients, or by testing ideas from the analytic situation in
observational studies, a method that has proved partic-
ularly useful for studying child development. This ap-
proach may still be useful clinically because, as Anton
Kris has emphasized, one listens differently now. Nev-
ertheless, it is clear that as a research tool this particu-
lar method has exhausted much of its novel investiga-
tive power. One hundred years after its introduction,
there is little new in the way of theory that can be
learned by merely listening carefully to individual pa-
tients. We must, at last, acknowledge that at this point
in the modern study of mind, clinical observation of in-
dividual patients, in a context like the psychoanalytic
situation that is so susceptible to observer bias, is not a
sufficient basis for a science of mind.
This view is shared even by senior people within the
psychoanalytic community. Thus, Kurt Eissler (9)
wrote, “The decrease in momentum of psychoanalytic
research is due not to subjective factors among the an-
alysts, but rather to historical facts of wider signifi-
cance: the psychoanalytic situation has already given
forth everything it contains. It is depleted with regard
to research possibilities, at least as far as the possibility
of new paradigms is concerned.”
Second, as these arguments make clear, although
psychoanalysis has historically been scientific in its
aim, it has rarely been scientific in its methods; it has
failed over the years to submit its assumptions to test-
able experimentation. Indeed, psychoanalysis has tra-
ditionally been far better at generating ideas than at
testing them. As a result of this failure, it has not been
able to progress as have other areas of psychology and
medicine.
The concerns of modern behavioral science for con-
trolling experimenter bias by means of blind experi-
ments has largely escaped the concern of psychoana-
lysts (for important exceptions, see references 10–12).
With rare exception, the data gathered in psychoana-
lytic sessions are private: the patient’s comments, as-
sociations, silences, postures, movements, and other
behaviors are privileged. In fact, the privacy of com-
munication is central to the basic trust engendered by
the psychoanalytic situation. Here is the rub. In almost
all cases, we have only the analysts’ subjective ac-
counts of what they believe has happened. As the re-
search psychoanalyst Hartvig Dahl (11) has long ar-
gued, hearsay evidence of this sort is not accepted as
data in most scientific contexts. Psychoanalysts, how-
ever, are rarely concerned that their account of what
happened in a therapy session is bound to be subjective
and biased.
As a result, what Boring (13) wrote, nearly 50 years
ago, still stands: “We can say, without any lack of ap-
preciation for what has been accomplished, that psy-
choanalysis has been prescientific. It has lacked exper-
iments, having developed no techniques for control.
In the refinement of description without control it is
impossible to distinguish semantic specification from
fact.”
Thus, in the future, psychoanalytic institutes should
strive to have at least a fraction of all supervised anal-
yses be accessible to this sort of scrutiny. This is impor-
tant not only for the psychoanalytic situation but also