From the Editors

Within contemporary psychoanalysis, analytic identities, core conceptual and developmental concepts, and cross-cultural issues are being radically re-envisioned. In this section, we are pleased to present five diverse reviews offering important reflections on a range of theoretical topics that explore these themes and invite reconsideration, exploration, and interrogation of prior views.

In The Unconscious: Theory, Research, and Clinical Implications, Julia-Matthews Bellinger writes in her review, authors Joel Weinberger and Valentina Stoycheva “aim to summarize and synthesize a now-extensive literature from cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychology, and social psychology that demonstrates the importance of unconscious processes in human mental functioning, and then to suggest its implications for psychotherapy practice.” Weinberger and Stoycheva are both researchers and clinicians, and before psychoanalytic training Matthews-Bellinger earned a Ph.D. in Neurobiology and Behavior (along with an M.D.); so authors and reviewer, together, are well-equipped to guide clinicians through the growing body of research on unconscious processes. Matthews-Bellinger's review follows Weinberger and Stoycheva as they trace shifts in scientific focus on unconscious processes, from a period of relative neglect; through an era of increased attention to “‘the normative unconscious‘—largely automatic, nonconflictual cognitive processes—to the past forty years, when developments in artificial intelligence and computational neuroscience have yielded ”several attempts to model how the brain functions.“ For psychoanalysts, the value of Weinberger and Stoycheva's book lies mainly in its treatment of research from fields adjacent to psychoanalysis; Matthews-Bellinger notes the absence, from this volume, of research on the dynamic unconscious conducted by psychoanalysts (e.g., Howard Shevrin, Linda Brakel,

Mark Solms, and the Boston Change Process Study Group). “The min