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As the title suggests, this book attempts to bring together and make links between ideas from such diverse fields as psychoanalytic thinking (primarily from the Anna Freudian tradition), attachment theory, developmental psychology and neuroscience. Many of us in the last few years have
been struck by the potential importance of new theoretical ideas that the above and other related disciplines have spawned, and many clinicians have struggled with questions such as: exactly what use can we make of these ideas? How might they influence the way we think and work? Can there be some kind of synthesis of such ideas that does not seem unwieldy? Can such a synthesis retain the core values of psychoanalytic thinking yet simultaneously spearhead a re-conceptualization of some of the ways we think and work? These are complex issues, and this book, I think, goes some way towards asking the right questions, but it may be that we are as yet quite far from finding satisfactory answers to them. The editor's task is perhaps made the more difficult by the inevitable time-lag between the original conceptualization of this book, which must have been some years ago when the initial excitement about these ideas was taking root, and the eventual writing and then publishing of the papers. Ideas that were startlingly new and exciting then become, by the time a review is published, almost part of how we all think.
The book has contributions from 10 different authors, as well as an introductory chapter by Viviane Green, and these chapters are basically in two sections; in Part One there are four theoretical papers by Allan Schore, Oliver Turnbull and Mark Solms, Miriam Steele and Peter Fonagy. These chapters outline some of the central ideas emerging from the relevant neuroscience and attachment theory literature, which have influenced the way we think about clinical work. The second section contains six chapters by different therapists focussing on clinical work with a range of ages and iss