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There are essentially two books here. The author intends to unify them by providing a basis that is both psychodynamically and ‘psychobiogenetically’ informed for making formulations about patients, especially disturbed ones. It is not clear that his intention is fulfilled. Nevertheless, the attempt to integrate the new neurobiology into psychotherapy concepts represents a bold start.
Chapters 1 to 9 (his ‘first’ book, as I am calling it) seem best directed to an audience of psychiatric trainees, and represent a fine, clinically sophisticated, psychodynamic approach for evaluating difficult patients as seen in initial or early stages. The discussion and examples illustrate his method and rationale of making early interventions and interpretations as part of this assessment. Throughout, his depictions of the interacting therapeutic dyad establish his fine writing and clinical talents. At times he becomes supervisory, addressing the reader with imperatives, thus surely seeming to speak more to students than peers (e.g. p. 73).
This style notably changes in the ‘second’ book (Chapters 10 to 15), where it is replaced by occasional suggestions of ‘one should’. His reserve there is justified, for he develops clinical theoretical speculations out of contemporary neurophysiological and empirical findings regarding emotions, memory and trauma.
Brockman is keen that the psychotherapy enterprise, however much it is an intuitive craft, deserves the stamp of ‘science’, and his version of it girds itself by being science-derived and science-guided. His presentation exemplifies this in several ways. First, he pursues the metaphor of a ‘map’ for developing the formulation of a clinical case. ‘Map’ means here that as interviews unfold, one develops data from several clinical important sources that enable one to construct, as in general science, evolving hypotheses about the patient. Second, Brockman rests his understanding and formulations about primitive affect and transference phenom