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In A Map of the Mind, Richard Brockman, a psychoanalyst on the faculty of Columbia University and the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center, has written a highly engaging book about psychotherapy, which is at once very contemporary and very traditional. The book's goal is to describe “how one finds one's bearings and maintains one's course in clinical work,” and its main thesis is that “the clinical formulation is the central aspect of the psychotherapeutic process.” Further, Brockman proposes “psychotherapy is appropriately a prospective science that can and should be practiced in accordance with scientific procedure where psychological and biological data are combined into a dynamic unity…. The process is less the receptive unfolding of layers, as in traditional psychotherapy, than it is an active search for data and the construction of multiple hypotheses, leading to validation through the generation of new meaning.” Thus, the formulation is the map referred to in the title, and the “science of psychotherapy” is the process of generating and validating it.
The book is divided into three parts. In the first, the author briefly sketches the history of basic psychodynamic concepts, such as psychic determinism, primary and secondary process, the dynamic unconscious, fixation, and regression. This section also outlines the concept of affect as the force that mediates both action and social attachment. The second section deals with sources of data on which the clinical formulation is built. These comprise mental status, transference, history, the patient's sense of safety or danger, resistance, and defense mechanisms; he describes how the therapist may observe and use these data to generate and test clinical hypotheses. The third section suggests how the therapist's understanding of affective responses can be informed not only by the patient's history and behavior, but also by findings of contemporary neurobiology and cognitive neuroscience. The final chapters of this section