Freud hoped to explain psychical phenomena in terms of the general laws of motion and energy, with the neurons, their processes and synapses as the basic elements. He constructed in the "Project for a Scientific Psychology" what James Strachey has called "a highly complicated and extraordinarily ingenious working model for the mind as a piece of neurologic machinery." Although Freud later abandoned these ties with the physical world, psychiatrists have always shared with him the hope that the gap between psychic processes and physiological functioning would be closed, and that psychodynamics and personality could be adequately understood in terms of neurological functioning.
Teitelbaum, a neurologist and psychiatrist, has written a book which attempts to close this gap. It is divided in two parts. Part I describes psychophysiological processes, including neurological integrative processes in personality dynamics, homeostasis and personality, neurological and homeostatic integration in learning and hypnosis, and psychosomatic processes. Part