Consistent with my long-standing aspiration to become a psychoanalyst, I trained in psychiatry at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center of Harvard Medical School in the early 1960s and completed a residency there. Then I changed direction. I decided not to obtain psychoanalytic training or even to have a clinical practice. Rather, I spent the next 40 years doing biological research—developing a reductionist approach to learning and memory, first in snails and then in mice.
