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McLaughlin reviews some of the recent research findings bearing on the topic of hemispheric specialization, and shows how these data can be integrated with many aspects of psychoanalytic theory. Although the author cautions against the tendency to “neurologize” excessively in theorizing about complex psychological phenomena, he draws our attention to the fascinating correspondences that seem to exist between what psychoanalysts have for years been calling “primary process” and the mode of function in the socalled nondominant hemisphere. A similar correlation between secondary process thought and the apparently more logic- and sequence-oriented dominant hemisphere has also been suggested. Faced with the likelihood that the two modes of thought are outgrowths of two separate regions of neural function, McLaughlin recognizes that primary process (and its correlates: the “unconscious” and “intuition”) deserves a much higher place in the neuropsychological scheme of things than we have been hitherto disposed to accord it. Primary process, in other words, should not be thought of as a mere carryover from childhood, something rather inferior, immature, etc. — unless one is an artist, a poet or an analytic patient engaged in free association. A more reasonable view, and one more in keeping with contemporary split-brain research, would be that we are endowed with two equally valuable modes of mental processing, each of which is “dominant” for a particular variety of life functions; furthermore, these modes are subserved by two equal partners with respect to cerebral cell mass. McLaughlin presents convincing evidence that hemispheric specialization, or rather, the type of balance between the two modalities in any given individual, may constitute the neurophysiological underpinning of what we refer to as cognitive style: some persons are prone to convergent thinking (in them, the “logic-oriented” hemisphere may predominate), others to divergent thinking. Convergent thinkers gr