It is this potential for plasticity of the relatively stereotyped units of the nervous system that endows each of us with our individuality.

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.

The problem for many people is that we cannot point to the underlying biological bases of most psychiatric disorders. In fact, we are nowhere near understanding them as well as we understand disorders of the liver or the heart.

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.

Life is sort of a circle. You come back to a lot of the interests that you had early in life.

It is this potential for plasticity of the relatively stereotyped units of the nervous system that endows each of us with our individuality.

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