Prof. Joseph Levine, M.D. is an emeritus associate professor in the Division of Psychiatry, Faculty of Health Sciences, Ben Gurion University in Israel. Prof. Levine is a certified psychiatrist with clinical experience in controlled trials of adult psychiatric disorders and in psychotherapy. He was awarded a NRSAD independent investigator grant for the study of Creatine Monohydrate in psychiatric disorders -- mainly Schizophrenia. He resides and treats patients in Tel Aviv and all of central Israel.
Introduction to the new blog
Hello everybody!
This is an introduction to the new blog on our ongoing research in psychiatry and psychology.
We, Igor Salganik and Joseph Levine, are senior psychiatrists and researchers with accumulated and extensive experience in psychiatry, neuroscience, and a variety of psycho-therapeutic treatment approaches.
Over time we have come to an inevitable conclusion that the field of psychiatry, unlike most other fields of medicine, has undergone relatively few changes in recent decades and in many ways seems to be on the spot.
There seem to be several reasons for this: one is the sheer complexity of the subject which is based not only on the processes related to the human body but also on mental processes like thought, behavior, and emotions. Another reason stems from the very definition of the psyche which is essentially metaphysical and cannot be easily or at all translated into materialistic concepts or, in other words, the body-mind connection is anything but trivial. Another reason is the paucity of the appropriate tools for the profound scientific analysis of mental processes. And finally, due to the stigma still associated with psychiatry, the funds invested into this field are sadly far away from those invested in the research of physical illnesses.
Let us also note that psychiatry is generally based on the phenomenological expressions of the mind and is, in many aspects, combined and intimately merged with psychology, the science whose roots stem from philosophy and other humanities, although, in recent decades, psychological research widely uses brain imaging tools.
All this led us to the decision to try and develop a new theory with the goal to merge between the well established knowledge in neurosciences on one hand and psychological processes of an individual and social nature on the other hand. The conceptualization of this theory should be held as simple as possible in order to facilitate both the understanding of intra-psychic processes as well as the treatment of psychological disorders. It will attempt to avoid psychiatric “slang” as much as it goes and use the model of internalized images and their development along the time axis as representing the “Social Self” of an individual.