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To an extent the authors of this important book have done their project a disservice with their subtitle Introduction to a Depth Neuropsychology. Psychoanalytic clinicians who are not familiar with the results and terminology of neuropsychology will, I fear, be overwhelmed by the technical detail and the state of the art argument that is on offer. The book is not an introduction. What it is is a report of work in progress. I propose to review it as such taking seriously the authors' plea:
From the outset we had a lot to learn about both of the fields we wanted to combine in this research. We trust readers will not judge these early steps too harshly, especially with respect to our handling of psychoanalytic technique. (p. ix)
Based on lectures and previously published material going back to 1993, the book does not have the excitement of current developments in neuro-psychoanalysis so well communicated by Mark Solms in his recent lectures at the Anna Freud Centre. But it does have important clinical work by Karen Kaplan-Solms describing the psychoanalytic treatment of patients with specific brain injuries. This work is of general psychoanalytic interest because it sheds light on the neurological correlations of subjective experience. We see that damage to the left frontal and anterior temporal lobes does not impair normal mourning of the loss of function while damage to the right side of the brain in the parietal-occipital lobes does. The description of the treatment of 12 patients will also be of interest to clinicians who work with disability although, of course, there will be inevitable disagreements over technique and approach associated with different orientations.
As a work in progress, what can the general clinical reader come away with? What seems firm is the importance of A.R. Luria's theoretical framework of dynamic localization. The philosopher Jerry Fodor has likened traditional narrow localization studies as being similar to specifying the location of the c