In medical school I didn’t enjoy the first few years very much. But I loved the clinical years. And I spent the summers working at psychiatric hospitals. I spent one summer at McLean Hospital, another one at Central Islip. And I was training to become, you know, a psychoanalyst, a psychiatrist. And then I decided in my senior year… there’s a six-month period in which you can do whatever you want, elective period. Most of the people were doing practical things, radiology, you know, something leading to the clinical experience. Dermatology. I decided that even a psychoanalyst should know something about the brain. Now this was not just out of the blue. I was reading the psychoanalytical literature and there were two people, a guy called Mortimer Ostow and a guy called Larry Kubie who were interested in the brain, they were both trained neurologists before they became psychoanalysts, and they both trod a bridge between brain and psychoanalysis. And I found their writing fascinating. For example, Larry Kubie was very much taken with Penfield’s work, in which he’s stimulating the cerebral cortex while operating for scar tissue, to remove [the scars] that caused epilepsy, and he would stimulate certain areas in the medial temporal lobe; he would elicit memory-like phenomena. Kubie thought this was fantastic. Unconscious mental processes. So he went up to Montreal with a tape recorder and tape-recorded some of this thing. Really quite fascinating. So I thought, you know, I should spend some time at a neurobiology lab.

So I spoke to Ostow about this, and he said there’s only one guy, Harry Grundfest. He really is interested in the mind. Now, when he said there’s only one guy, he meant that literally because at NYU there was nobody working on the brain. It isn’t like now, you walk down Broadway and four out of five people you bump into are neurobiologists. Very few people working on the brain in those days. So I went to see Harry Grundfest, and he said, ’What are you interested in?’ And I said, ‘I’d like to know where in the brain the ego, the id and the superego is located.’ And he looked at me as if I was meshuga. He said, 'What are you talking about? You know, we don’t know whether these concepts have any meaning whatsoever. We have not the foggiest notion where they are in the brain. If you want to study the brain, you have to study it one cell at a time.'