Early in my career, I was disappointed that psychoanalysis was not becoming more empirical, was not becoming more scientific. It was primarily concerned with individual patients. It wasn't trying to collect data from large groups of people who have been analyzed.

Rather than studying the most complex form of memory in a very complicated animal, we had to take the most simple form - an implicit form of memory - in a very simple animal. So I began to look around for very simple animals. And I focused in on the marine snail Aplysia.

What the Ellison Foundation and I are hoping to encourage is a more holistic approach to psychiatry, in which psychotherapy is put on as rigorous a level as psychopharmacology.

Eric Kandel Quotes