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This is a book of two halves and I found the first half to be somewhat hard going, as it is dense, theoretical, and academic. However, it proved to be worthwhile reading. Each chapter is written by someone different, so the styles change accordingly. The introduction by Viviane Green, the editor, is particularly useful to read before embarking on the main body of the book. It gives a broad overview of the book's content and the impact research has had on the understanding of emotional development as well as the biological and clinical approaches that all lead towards integration. It also explains some of the background material contained in the various chapters.
Chapter one is by Allan Schore and goes over the growing number of psychological and biological disciplines that have converged over the last decade or so to further our understanding of the emotional processes in human development. He goes on to explore developmental neurobiology and gives lengthy explanations of the brain structures involved in the processing of socio-emotional information placing particular emphasis on the fact that the brain is a self-organising system but, more importantly, “the self-organising of the developing brain occurs in the context of a relationship with another self, another brain” (p. 23). He goes on to introduce and expand on the work of various researchers and their findings, and also covers the critical effect that early interpersonal experiences have on the organisation of the limbic system, as speculated by Bowlby. He develops this to cover the last thirty years of the scientific study of the unconscious mind (psychoanalysis), and the unconscious processes mediated by the right brain. He illustrates this with models of how attachment experiences influence right brain maturation. There are further illustrations using photographs of mother and baby interactions demonstrating affect synchrony and attuned interaction. He also shows how interactive repair can occur. One particu