Neuropeptide Y in Relation to Behavior and Psychiatric Disorders

Abstract

Before proceeding to review and discuss “hard” observations on NPY in relation to behavior and psychiatric disorders, allow for some introductory remarks of a more theoretical nature. Basic scientists sometimes have difficulties fully comprehending the degree of controversy evoked in clinical settings by the reduction of mental processes to biological phenomena. A modem school of philosophy of science (see, e.g., 1) claims such different frameworks as, e.g., those of neurobiology and psychoanalytic psychology to be theoretically impossible to reconcile or “incommensurable.” I beg to differ. The postulated incommensurability is destructive, artificial, and unnecessary. Release and action of neurotransmitters, or the flow of primitive id impulses and the activation of specific ego defenses, can all be seen as different ways of modeling inherently monistic processes of the human mind. These different models may be useful at different levels of description or within different domains, and they may or may not be possible to map onto each other. Much can be won when they are integrated. Finding and applying isomorphisms between psychological and biological models is likely to enrich both. Animal models of anxiety, used in the work described below and widely used by other investigators, are based on a conflict model of anxiety that, nomenclature aside, is virtually identical to that used by psychoanalytic psychology (see,e.g., 2). Integration, it turns out, can be productive.