When I was a teenager, television offered little encouragement for learning. One weekly show stood out, The David Susskind Show. Broadcast from New York City, it featured thoughtful conversations not only with famous guests but also with some of the most brilliant minds of the time. By the age of thirteen, I was saying to the world that I wanted to be a psychiatrist. So, one of David Susskind's guests especially fascinated me: Albert Ellis. I listened to his every word. He was the first...

You don't always recognize it when it happens. Only years later, looking back across decades, do certain moments stand out - unexpected instances of learning that shape everything that follows. Fifty years ago, during my final year of psychiatric residency, I found myself struggling to make sense of much of what I had chosen as my field. In a seminar led by an exceptional professor of psychiatry, I voiced my confusion. "Dr. Luby, what am I to make of all of this? There are psychoanalysis,...

I wanted to understand psychiatry as he understands it, because he is the only modern psychiatrist to receive the Nobel Prize and is a world-renowned researcher. He is Eric Richard Kandel, M.D. He trained as a psychiatrist and practiced psychiatry for a short time. He devoted the majority of his career to research, writing, and teaching, giving psychiatry a stronger basis in neuroscience. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his research on memory and co-edited a definitive text in...