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This collection of papers offers the opportunity to engage with the neuroscientific issues that are now so relevant to psychoanalysis. It brings together some current psychoanalytic, attachment, neuropsychological and psycho-biological perspectives on emotional development, hence the subtitle of the book Creating Connections. It offers an introduction to current developments in these different fields of research on emotional development and is a wide-ranging and useful book that well repays the effort of reading it.
The book is divided into two sections, the first contains four papers by writers pre-eminent in the field of neuroscience and attachment theory. All have written in more extensive detail elsewhere but these papers offer excellent, comprehensive introductions to the work of Schore, Solms and Turnbull in neuroscience, a useful summary by Miriam Steele of current developments in research on attachment theory and a paper by Peter Fonagy which addresses the claim that genetics determine psychological problems. The second section provides a clinical perspective on development, with six papers on patients within different age ranges from infancy to adulthood with problematical development issues.
Allan Schore's ‘The human unconscious: the development of the right brain and its role in early emotional life’ is a dense and fascinating paper. It presents an overview of recent psychological studies of the social-emotional development of infants and neurobiological research on the maturation of the early developing right brain. Schore describes the early development of the right hemisphere of the brain with particular reference to its link to attachment. Neurobiology has established that the infant brain ‘is designed to be moulded by the environment it encounters’ (p. 24), which means that early socio-emotional experiences influence the maturation of the biological structure of the brain. The early attachment relationship of the infant ‘powerfully affects the structur