Hobson at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, above, and sleeping, lower right. JOHN SOARES

From Neurobiology to Psychology

J. Allan Hobson began his research career early. His father, a Hartford patent attorney, introduced him to tinkerers and inventors, built him a basement chemistry lab, and encouraged his curiosity about nature. In high school he worked for an educational psychologist, Page Sharp, who became his mentor. "One day," says Hobson, "he told me that if I really wanted to study the mind, then I would have to go to medical school and study the brain." And so at Wesleyan College, a "hotbed of Freudianism," Hobson studied science and completed his premedical courses; he also read everything Freud wrote and did his undergraduate (English) thesis on Freud and Dostoyevsky.

At Harvard Medical School he decided to specialize in psychiatry. He served his internship at New York's Bellevue Hospital and his residency at the Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts Mental Health Center (MMHC) --where he realized, to his dismay, that the tie between psychiatry and natural science had weakened to a point where psychiatry was "proudly, defiantly, and completely divorced from medicine." After a year he left to do sleep research with human subjects and brain research with animal models, including a stint with REM-sleep research pioneer Michel Jouvet in France. Thus armed with experience, in 1964 he asked his residency chief at MMHC, Bullard professor of psychiatry Jack Ewalt, if he could split his time between psychiatric duties and animal studies. Ewalt agreed, and Hobson finished his residency.

Ironically, as Hobson's career has progressed, psychiatry's pendulum has swung all the way from divorcing itself from medicine to embracing psychoactive drugs. While not denying these drugs' immediate benefits, Hobson is wary. "This is a very sobering business," he says. "We have no idea of what the long-term consequences are; and, particularly when psychoactive drugs are used to treat minor disorders, we appear to be playing with dynamite."

A larger problem, as Hobson sees it, is that the psychiatric pendulum has swung too far toward depersonalized science. "Psychiatry has certainly become very neurobiologically oriented, which is good; but it has lost sight of psychology. Right now we need something more humanistic and all-embracing than neurobiology. A new, scientifically responsible but humanistic psychology would be of immense benefit."

Thus, despite his successful brain chemistry research, Hobson's fundamental aim hasn't changed; he is still seeking to strengthen a compelling bridge--the swaying, slippery span that connects effective brain research to psychiatric treatment and humanity's growing understanding of the mind.