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Eric Kandel's (2005) "Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and the New Biology of Mind July 16, 2005 Eric Kandel's (2005) "Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and the New Biology of Mind." Washington , DC : American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc. I am a long time admirer of Eric Kandel MD. Kandel is a University Professor (the institution's highest academic rank) at Columbia University , director at the Fred Kalvi Institute for Brain Sciences, and Senior Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and founding director of the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior at Columbia University . In 2000, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his work on the molecular neurobiology of learning and memory. One of Kandel's goals has been to arrive at a biology of the mind. He has been critical of psychoanalysis for treating the brain as a 'black box.' His early aspiration to train as a psychoanalyst was exchanged for a career as a neuroscientist exploring how the brain 'learns' and 'remembers.' Kandel has written a series of pieces in the American Journal of Psychiatry calling for experimental validation of psychoanalytic theory. Parenthetically, there have been many psychoanalysts (e.g., Robert Holt) who have issued similar pleas. Kandel has recently been involved in schizophrenia research, focusing on polygenic models in the mouse. I recently posted an in-depth description of this research and my criticisms of the latter, and I am including it as an appendix following this posting. Currently, I am reviewing Eric Kandel's new volume "Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and the New Biology of Mind" published in 2005 by American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc. It is an excellent volume and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in mind/brain relationships.Kandel has successfully applied a radical reductionistic approach to the study of learning and memory since these processes are highly conserved across species. However, a radical reductionism fails to take into account the involved complexities when one moves to the study and research of such a complicated human illness as schizophrenia. It is particularly here that a translational approach which is heavily weighted towards 'bottom-up' influences to the exclusion of 'top-down' influences is treading on thin ice. Kandel makes it clear that his goal is to biologize the mind and he does so by accenting traditional genetic factors to the exclusion of the emergent field of epigenetics. Simply phrased, Kandel places far greater emphasis on DNA sequences than the current translational research suggests is valid for complex human functioning and disorders. Kandel completely omits any references to epigenetics, which research demonstrates to be of significance in non-genomic transmission of behavioral patterns. As I noted previously: Michael Meaney, of the Douglas Hospital Research Centre, Montreal , Canada , notes: These are classic examples of epigenetic, or nongenomic, inheritance, where traits of the parents are transmitted to offspring in a manner not dependent on information encoded in the nuclear genes. Maternal effects in plants and insects alter the form and intensity of defensive responses to threat. The environmental experience of the mother is thus translated through an epigenetic mechanism of inheritance [through methylation of DNA] into phenotypic variation in the offspring. Indeed, maternal effects could result in the transmission of adaptive responses across generations" (p. 5). I am also including the following previously posted reference to this highly important scientific field: "Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb (2005) have detailed the many different forms of epigenetic inheritance systems-EIS (see their "Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life" published by MIT Press). Jablonka and Lamb described the following EIS's:self-sustaining feedback loops-memories of gene activity; cellular structural inheritance-architectural memories, e.g., prions in Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, i.e., 'mad cow's disease'; chromatin-marking systems-chromosomal memories (chromatin is the DNA plus RNA, proteins, including histones, etc.-the 'stuff' of chromosomes)-methylated DNA significantly influences gene transcription and are also a part of the heredity system that transfers epigenetic information from mother cells to daughter cells; and RNA interference (RNAi) which leads to the stable and cell heritable silencing of specific genes (depending on small RNA molecules known as siRNAs). Besides the pathways of genetic and epigenetic inheritance, Jablonka and Lamb (2005) delineate two more inheritance systems: behavioral and symbolic. The latter two being additionally significant for psychosocial scientists in their attempts to understand mental illnesses. Epigenetic research, I believe, will become much more significant in the future as applied to psychiatric disorders." Kandel is a very sophisticated researcher whose adherence to a radical reductionism, I believe, will hold him back from arriving at a more comprehensive model of the schizophrenias. For example, because his translational approach is not grounded in a systems perspective, but remains at a genocentric/neurobiological reductionistic level, he may fail to appreciate that the the biology of mind is at the same time recursively involved with a sociology and psychology of brain, i.e., 'bottom-up' influences are at the same time 'imbued' and intimately involved simultaneously with 'top-down' influences arising not only from the interpersonal and social surround, but also importantly, from internal 'psychological' influences, such as memories (e.g., prior traumatic experiences occurring within particularized psycho-sociological and familial contexts), beliefs, interpretive and volitional activities, etc. The biology of mind is incomplete without recognition and inclusion of, based on solid experimental research,the psychology/sociology of brain (such as one finds in the emergent scientific fields of social and affective neuroscience). Brian Koehler PhD |