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. Herbert Y Meltzer, Bixler/May/Johnson Professor of Psychiatry and Pharmacology, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine 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. Samuel Barondes, Robertson Professor of Neurobiology and Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco