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This is an important book that is clearly written, informative, and makes a significant contribution to our psychoanalytic knowledge and treatment. It answers the challenges to psychoanalysis concerning its scientific validity and its effectiveness as a treatment. Dr. Brockman, himself an analyst, presents the findings from the neural sciences that support psychoanalytic theory and therapy.
Freud's dream was to make psychoanalysis into a hard science. As we know, Freud started out as a serious researcher in neurophysiology. When Freud wrote his “Project for a Scientific Psychology (Rothgeb, 1973)” he did not have the technology to make his dream come true. Thus, he abandoned his attempts at understanding how the brain and the mind work together and focused solely on the mind. Today, we do have the technology and can begin to integrate this dualism, the mind/brain split, which has existed since the work of Descartes in the 17th century. Thus, Freud's dream is within our grasp and can become a reality.
This book reinforced my interest in providing scientific validity for psychoanalysis. Some years ago at NYU—Bellevue, my staff and I conducted doubleblind experiments of subliminal stimulation using the tachistoscope. The articles that were published by others, such as Dr. Lloyd Silverman, and myself demonstrated that unconscious fantasies existed and only stimulating them subliminally, not supraliminally, produced psychological responses that could be measured. Modern neural science has made even more important strides in understanding psychopathology and treatment. I will be the special editor of an edition of the Academy Journal in 2000, devoted to how the neural sciences can inform the psychoanalytic clinician. Because of the excellence of this book, I invited Dr. Brockman to contribute an article.
Dr. Brockman discusses the finding of neural scientists that there are two forms of memory—emotional and declarative. The emotional memory is encoded in the amygdala and its