Introduction: When Matter Speaks

For decades, psychoanalysts and neuroscientists have asked similar, fundamental questions: What internal pathways and processes determine our perceptions of self, others, and the world? What mental operations lead us from observing the world to re-envisioning it? How do our visualizations of the world compel and inspire us to engage—or re-engage—with it? In recent years, such questions have guided and encouraged a continuing effort at integration between psychoanalysis and neuroscience. At the same time, they have drawn the two intellectual endeavors still more deeply into a shared paradox. Both psychoanalysis and neuroscience attempt to elicit expression from what Primo Levi in his autobiographical masterpiece, The Periodic Table (1975), describes as mute matter. In Levi's memoir, the repeated juxtaposition of scientific laboratories to mountainous landscapes embodies his drive to communicate with matter—a drive that impels his self-education, nurtures his imaginative life, and confronts him with unbearable realities. Images of sheer escarpments, of restless Alpine odysseys, of minerals extracted industrially from beneath rock face, and of an unforgiving search for a personal and political mission within the broken, enigmatic terrain—all appear prominently and vitally in The Periodic Table, all recall the contradictory, Sisyphean nature of the confrontation with silent matter, and all foreshadow the final, disastrous mountain journey that ends at Auschwitz.

Motivated, like Levi, by the challenge of silent matter, psychoanalysts and neuroscientists have attempted to trace and identify myriad forms of human expression and behavior as they are constructed both by the fundamental chemistry of the brain and by the primary operations of the unconscious mind. Neural pathways and unconscious mental connections generate movement, gesture, voice, and visualization—allowing for personal communication, artistic creativity, cultural interactions, and social engagement—but they function within a silent, internal world. It is no coincidence but rather a significant historical marker that Sigmund Freud began his career as a neurophysiologist. Like the young Levi, Freud derived professional inspiration, intellectual fulfillment, and moral solace from the labor of interacting with and giving language to mute matter. Levi's travel into the mountains—just like research in the laboratory—meant the continuous search for what existed behind and beneath the surface. Like Freud, the Turinese chemist and writer pursued that search with unique skills of observation, description, and analysis; it represented, however, not only a personal quest but also a twentieth-century phenomenon. That type of ceaseless exploration, as Nobel laureate Eric R. Kandel has described in The Age of Insight (2012), defines not only the future of psychology in particular but also the direction of our intellectual era in general.

Just as in The Periodic Table Levi joins his life story and scientific aspirations to the history and culture of his city, Turin, so Kandel, in his memoir In Search of Memory (2006), as well as in The Age of Insight, closely links his intellectual journey and neurobiological researches to the urban history and modernist culture of his birthplace, Vienna. Both Levi and Kandel emphasize the integral connection between personal consciousness and civic environment. The subtitle to The Age of Insight—The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present—immediately identifies that connection as the starting-point of the book. "Vienna 1900" represents the systematic effort in medicine, art, and psychoanalysis to seek new truths by delving "below the surface appearance of things" (2012, p. 27), an effort that leads from medical research, artistic experimentation, and psychoanalytic theory to neuropsychology and the biology of the brain.

Vienna 1900 also refers to another effort. Throughout the book, Kandel traces in art and psychology the ways in which the human mind constructs models of the self, others, and the world. That model-building effort, he reminds us, defines the human brain as a "creativity machine" (pp. 205ff). Not only is the brain peculiarly receptive to the surrounding world but it actively and creatively engages with it. Through that activity we recognize and formulate patterns of thought and behavior, manage ambiguities of perception and understanding, and choose between self-protection and empathic interaction when responding to others. The creation of...