096: Casey Schwartz

CASEY SCHWARTZ is a graduate of Brown University and has a Masters Degree in psychodynamic neuroscience from University College London. She has worked as a staff writer at Newsweek/The Daily Beast, where she covered neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times and The New York Sun. She lives in New York City.

In This Interview Casey and I Discuss…

• The One You Feed parable
• What neuropsychanalysis is
• Battling self doubt
• The importance of asking others for help
• The Don Draper approach to creativity
• Taking a “mind bath”
• The divide between neuroscience and psychoanalysis
• Freud’s Boldest Idea: Transference
• Mapping transference in the brain
• The resurgence of the unconscious in current neuroscience research
• Avoiding the temptation to boil us down to chemicals
• Honoring the mystery of human life and behavior
• Reductionism vs holism in science
• The fantasy of the easy answer
• The oversimplification of the role of the amygdala
• The dangers of extrapolating animal studies to humans
• Psychoanalysis on patients who have had brain damage
• The uneven pathway of recovery
• Starving neural pathways that separate thought from feeling