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This is a very impressive book, of great interest to any reader who is a psychotherapist (and indeed those who are not), for many different reasons.
Firstly, In the Mind Fields is a beautifully constructed narrative, scaled over a decade, of a young woman coming to terms with the apparently distinctive universes of brain and mind. In taking the world's first formal Masters course linking psychoanalysis with the neurosciences, Schwartz is exposed to novel psychotherapeutic concepts (novel at least to her), to parts of the brain she is unfamiliar with, and to cutting edge neuroscientific technologies. Reading of her personalized encounters was entertaining as well as educational. But the book is also a narrative of other journeys - between University College London and Yale (where her cross-continental Masters course is boldly co-convened), to the imposing world of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and indeed to a wine farm in Southern Africa. Even if it were not a book about a very modern science, it would be a fascinating Paul Theroux-style travel narrative. But, in the way that good education in the mental sciences can be, the book is also a journey of the soul - as the themes of her formal work intersect with the mental health issues in her family, and with her developing understanding of the mind. For these reasons, the book would be a good read even for the non-therapist.
Secondly, the book is a narrative around a developing field: neuropsychoanalysis. This is a discipline in which I have played a modest role over the years - but I have had no link with the writing of the book, so I read an outsider's account of my home turf with fascination. Schwartz's view of the inter-discipline is, on the one hand, of a vibrant and exciting set of bridges - between what initially seem to her to be the radically different disciplines of brain and mind. Gradually, she comes to realize that these are really just two perspectives on a single phenomenon (for more on this dual-