After the war, the Austrians just denied their role in it all. They didn't teach it in school. But since 1990 they have openly acknowledged their role in the Holocaust and I feel more comfortable in Austria. I feel a sort of reconciliation.

I really like the city of Vienna. I like its art, its music and its architecture. In short, I like the culture that Vienna represents. What really captures me is the period around 1900 - the time of Freud, Schnitzler and Klimt. This is the period in which the modern view of mind was born.

I went to medical school after having decided to do so somewhere between my junior and senior year at Harvard - very late. I initially wanted to be an intellectual historian.

One of the wonderful things about Internet is its like a salon. It brings people together from different intellectual walks of life.

Not only Freud but artists and writers were also interested in the unconscious. It was medicine that made the first steps toward modernity.

There are cells in the brain that respond to faces. This is one of the reasons that I deal with portraiture. We can learn a lot about our perception of facial expression from the behavior of these cells.

I have on the one hand a hatred and on the other a yearning for Vienna. I left when I was nine years old because I was Jewish. And even before 1938, the anti-Semitism in Austria was probably deeper than it was in Germany or in other European countries.