ABSTRACT
Psychiatry is the branch of medicine that addresses disorders of behavior and the psychological processes that underlie behavior. Much of what it deals with consists in disturbances of emotion and emotional behavior; though, to be sure, cognitive, motoric and perceptual symptoms also loom large. Now, the cornerstone of my own approach to psychology is that all psychological processes, as well as the behavior that they underlie, are a product of activity in the brain (an assumption that is rarely questioned openly, though often implicitly abandoned in contemporary psychological science). It follows, therefore, that an understanding of the neural processes that mediate the psychological processes underlying emotion and emotional behavior-that is, an understanding of the "neuropsychology of emotion" -is fundamental to psychiatry. If so, such an understanding should yield a rational approach to the very difficult task of constructing a viable taxonomy of the psychiatric disorders. This task is at present largely left to committee decisions on operational definitions of words to describe symptoms, symptom-clusters, and syndromes, with the principal aim of permitting consistent communication between different clinicians and research workers. The purpose of the present chapter is to offer a preliminary sketch-map of what an alternative, rational taxonomy, based on current understanding of the neuropsychology of the emotions, might look like.
