Explorations Between Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience: At the Edge of Mind and Brain. By David D. Olds. New York:  Routledge, 2024,  304 pp., $39.95 paperback.

One of the pleasures of getting old(er) is the opportunity to witness the growth of thinkers whom we admire. For me, watching Dr. David Olds develop his ideas over time has been inspiring and educational. Dr. Olds is a professor of clinical psychiatry at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is also a training and supervising analyst at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center. For much of his career, Dr. Olds has made an effort to integrate psychoanalysis with other disciplines, including neuroscience, semiotics, evolutionary psychology, genetics, primatology, and biology (to name a few). He has been an editor of Neuropsychoanalysis, a journal that also strives to make bridges between neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Since the early 1990s, Dr. Olds has organized a course for psychoanalytic candidates that encourages them to explore the interface between psychoanalysis and other disciplines. He has been in this game for decades.

Now, in this book, we have an accessible overview of Dr. Olds's lifetime “explorations” of the interactions and crossovers of the mind and brain in psychoanalysis and neuroscience. These previously published articles, now collected in one volume, present a window into the progress of “neuropsychoanalysis” over recent decades. Dr. Olds has allowed his psychoanalytic understanding of depth psychology to be tweaked by his searching dives into other disciplines. He is one of the few people in our field capable of bridging the divide, and this book allows us to retrace his journey.

Chapter 1 (originally published in ) begins with an examination of “active technique” as introduced to us by Sándor Ferenczi. This, of course, has been a controversial concept in that it shifts psychoanalysis away from the sole practice of interpretation to a more active position in

which we “do” things to move the process along. Ferenczi argued his