Psychobiography Reading Group of the Psychohistory Forum – 13th Meeting
Dedicated to ERIC R. KANDEL
May 17, 2025, 11:00am – 1pm EDT
[Virtual room opens at 10:45am EDT]
This meeting is free to attend, but RSVP is required.
Please RSVP by using the Registration Form below
Eric Kandel (b. 1929) is an American neuropsychiatrist. Until his recent retirement, Dr. Kandel was a University Professor and the Sagol Professor of Brain Science at Columbia University, where he also codirected the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, and a senior investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
In 2000, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his studies of learning and memory. He is the author of In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (2006), The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present (2012), Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures (Columbia, 2016), and The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves (2018).
Eric Kandel is also a resident-psychohistorian in the Brain-Mind world. His transdisciplinary mind provided a unique opportunity for him to promote public understanding of neuroscience, and to put brain science into a conversation with art, neurodiversity, and behavior.
For this Psychobiography Reading Group session, we will use the readings, as well as the recordings that pertain to Eric Kandel’s psychobiography. Please note that for this meeting, we will have the readings and the “listenings,” as E. Kandel was interviewed many times, and some of those interviews are very much psychobiographical.
These are the mandatory listenings (##1-4) and readings (#5):
1. Eric Kandel: From Refugee to Nobel Prize Winner (3 min): https://youtu.be/Em_z70HYCck?si=KiAHyG_4l8cW1pww
2. Web of Stories: Eric Kandel, Scientist. Please listen to each of the sections of this autopsychobiographical audio collection at the following link: https://www.webofstories.com/play/eric.kandel/1
Please click on each short episode on the list while inside the “Web of Stories” portal. [Do not click on the image below – it is provided for illustration purposes only.]
Also, these stories (all 80 episodes) are available on YouTube, so you can enjoy these stories in the video format.
Here is the listing of all 80 episodes with the corresponding YouTube links: Web of Stories – Eric Kandel. All episodes marked in red are mandatory “listenings.”
3. Eric Kandel – What if psychoanalysis were combined with neuroscience? (3 min):
https://youtu.be/zOZZcO-4wdc?si=yseT60mHpyWM0W4t
4. We Are What We Remember, with Dr. Eric Kandel (70 min): https://youtu.be/IV4nDxG-nfc?si=vwfZLSMpKdHsrTaQ
5. Kandel, E.R. (2022). There is life after the Noble Prize. Columbia University Press. [This is a mandatory reading: pp. 1-84.]
“In this slim but wide-ranging book, Kandel – an escapee from Nazi Austria and a student of history and literature in college – reflects thoughtfully on his recent research as a benchtop neuroscientist1 his experiences as a public communicator about brain and cognitive science, and his keen exploration of the arts.” (Howard Gardner)
The backstory: One day in 1996, the neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel took a call from his project officer at the National Institute of Mental Health, who informed him that he had been awarded a key grant. Also, the officer said that he and his colleagues thought Kandel would win the Nobel Prize. “I hope not soon,” Kandel’s wife, Denise, said when she heard this. Sociologists had found that Nobel recipients often did not contribute much more to science, she explained. In this book, Kandel recounts his remarkable career since receiving the Nobel in 2000-or his experience of proving to his wife that he was not yet “completely dead intellectually.”
He takes readers through his lab’s scientific advances, including research into how long-term memory is stored in the brain and age-related memory loss as well as the neuroscience of drug addiction and schizophrenia. Kandel relates how the Nobel gave him the opportunity to reach a far larger audience, which in turn allowed him to discover and pursue new directions. He describes his efforts to promote public understanding of science and to put brain science and art into conversation. Kandel also discusses his return to Austria, which he had fled as a child, and observing its coming to terms with the Nazi period. Showcasing Kandel’s accomplishments, erudition, and wit, There Is Life After the Nobel Prize is a candid account of the working life of an acclaimed scientist.”
The following is NOT a mandatory reading:
Kandel, Eric R. (2012). The age of insight: the quest to understand the unconscious in art, mind, and brain, from Vienna 1900 to the present. Random House.
NB: This is the full manuscript – ENJOY!
Also, although it is not a mandatory reading, some concepts described in this book are important for psychohistory/ psychobiography field. That is why one of such concept, the Beholder Share phenomenon, will be explained in a short power-point presentation during our session on 5-17-25.
The Psychobiography Research and Publication Group of the Psychohistory Forum created the virtual Psychobiography Reading Group in 2023. We meet in alternate months, with a summer break, and we work hard to keep it as a serious psychoanalytic approach to psychobiography. Subsequently, our focus will be on classic works of psychodynamic psychobiography, with the bottom-up approach rather than the one coming from explicit underlying theories.
Please note that we choose short readings to ensure that they will be read ahead of time. Individuals who have not done the readings for this group will need to stay muted to establish this as a true discussion group.
Membership in the Psychohistory Forum is not required, although it is recommended, but your RSVP is required – see the form below.
You will get the response to your RSVP that includes the Zoom information. The Zoom link reminder will also be sent out the day before the meeting.