Carl Feinstein, M.D. is the Director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and a Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. He is also the Director of the Stanford Autism Center at Packard Children’s Hospital. Dr. Feinstein received his B.A. from the University of Chicago, and his M.D. from the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center. He did his Psychiatry Residency at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in the National Institute of Mental Health Training program, beginning in 1969. During this period, he was a Ginsburg Fellow at the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (GAP), where he first met Dr. Joseph Noshpitz. This began the inspired mentorship he received from Dr. Noshpitz for the next 13 years, bridging the years of his Child Psychiatry training at George Washington University/Children’s Hospital National Medical Center to the beginning of his academic career there in 1976. Throughout these formative years, Dr. Feinstein was influenced by Dr. Noshpitz’s fascination with the earliest stages of child development, and in particular, child social and communication development.

In this lecture, Dr. Feinstein traces the remarkable advances in understanding of childhood social development taking place, mostly in the last 15 years, in the laboratories of developmental social neuroscientists. About these advances, Thomas Insel, Director of NIMH wrote (2010): “Social Neuroscience has come a long way in a short time…Much of this stunning growth has been driven by human neuro-imaging studies seeking the neural correlates of psychological processes, from face perception to social preferences.”

While these advances have largely escaped the attention of mainstream child psychiatry for more than two decades, many of the underlying developmental information and research methodology derives from the work of prominent child psychiatrists in the 1970’s and 1980’s. His thesis is that child psychiatrists, perhaps kicking and screaming, must be brought into a vital engagement with 21st century social cognitive neuroscience, and, in the process, must re-engage with the developmental ideas that we once pioneered, briefly glorified, but then, unfortunately, neglected.