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Philip Bromberg's work has been celebrated within certain sectors of the psychoanalytic community and underappreciated in others. In The Shadow of the Tsunami and the Growth of the Relational Mind, Bromberg's central clinical focus, as in his two previous books, Standing in the Spaces and Awakening the Dreamer , is trauma; but Bromberg does more than focus on a theoretical and technical approach to a narrow group of patients. Rather, he uses the concept of trauma as an entry point to re-imagine aspects of psychic structure in all patients, and to reconceptualize how the treatment situation works, not so much as a means of resolution of intrapsychic conflict, but as a facilitator for healing splits in the self, and of emotional growth through the expansion of the capacity to tolerate, articulate, and process previously unformulated affective experience.
Although, in this volume, Bromberg adds further clarity to the theoretical model of trauma and dissociation put forward in his first two books, the major theoretical innovation in The Shadow of the Tsunami and the Growth of the Relational Mind is Bromberg's effort to integrate the findings of modern neuroscience with his relational theory of normal and pathological psychic development and of the mechanism of action of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. The book begins with a 37-page Foreword by the neuropsychoanalyst Allan Schore. Schore describes recent neuroscientific findings, hypotheses and speculations concerning attachment, the impact of the interpersonal on affect regulation, the effects of attachment trauma and dissociation on the right brain, neurobiological substrates of unconscious communication, and the mechanism of action of psychotherapy (specifically,