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The talking cure, as most of us trained in psychoanalysis know, was Anna O's folksy way of describing her treatment with Freud when he replaced Breuer. Little did she realise that she and Freud had opened a new century of psychological treatment based upon talking, and as she also noted, ‘chimney-sweeping her mind’. Now, a young and thoroughly twenty-first-century psychoanalyst uses recent advances in mind-brain research to designate her role and that of psychodynamically oriented psychotherapists as ‘microsurgeons of the mind’. What better metaphor for the recent ‘decade of the brain’ in the United States and the new integration that Freud had hoped for mind and brain sciences in the next century! Indeed, Freud's own surgical analogies for technique are returned to with the prefix, micro, as the author suggests that she seeks to ‘put the neuro back in neurosis’. Caveat lector —for even as I write ‘metaphor’ I am imposing my own bias on the text. This author disavows her use of microsurgery as figurative, but tries instead to convince us of the penetrance of our words to the nuclei and fibres of the brain itself, just as the youthful Freud tried to explicate the neurophysiology of neuronal types for his Project.
In so far as I am writing to and for psychoanalysts, I first offer a caution that this is a book intended for intelligent lay people who may decide they want to visit a psychoanalyst, or for psychoanalysts or neuroscientists who wish to learn about integrative models of mind and brain described in plain English. If either of the latter reads this with the expectation that she will receive the last word on the complexities of such integration she will be disappointed. This volume is written for its appeal to a larger audience, and as such gives a tremendous advantage to our profession in its tolerance, its clarity of presentation and its simplicity. Moreover, this is a lively exposition of the case histories of a small number of patients and their interactions