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The title of this book struck me at first as something of a tautology, for what is experience if it is not lived? But, like the book itself, it contains a density of meaning that unfolds over the five chapters of Parts l and ll, and is illustrated by personal experience in Part lll.
The author aims to present the crucial difference between experience mediated by the left and right sides of the brain. In this she draws heavily on Iain McGilchrist's
now classic The Master and his Emissary (2009), and not the least aspect of her contribution is to make his fascinating neurological study more accessible for use by psychotherapists. ‘Briefly, the right hemisphere involves the intuitive, implicit, mostly unconscious, sensory-based experience, in the moment, which remains open, receptive, and wide ranging. It comes online in development before the left hemisphere and remains oriented to the input from the body but also to otherness in terms of the world beyond the bodily self’ (p. 5). The functions of the left, in contrast, ‘which become active from about 18 to 24 months of age, are those which link to the realm of conscious control of oneself and the environment as it relates to the world. These include fine-motor co-ordination, development of language, manipulation of objects’ (p. 6). While recommending the optimal integration of these two ‘ways of being’, she follows McGilchrist in warning against the overvaluation of left-brain functions, which are described as having a tendency to control, rationalize and dominate both the natural world and modern society (increased pressure towards bureaucratic procedures are an example of this tendency: the map can come to be taken for the terrain it represents, and measuring phenomena take the place of appreciating them).
Anderson found herself feeling increasingly alienated by the psychoanalytic leaning towards ‘parsing reality’ and ‘idealising texts and theories as if they hold deeper wisdom than does one's own experience’ (p. xi