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Sarah Sutton has trawled deeply through three decades of brain research, to digest the key lessons from the numerous discoveries of neuroscience. She presented some of them in her previous book, ‘Being taken in: The framing relationship’ (Sutton, 2014). This most recent book is, I would argue, an even more valuable treasure trove of interdisciplinary findings for Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy. With huge skill, Sutton presents complex ideas with clarity and humour. Throughout the book, she shows us that psychoanalysis was often correct about the functioning of the mind. However, Sutton is not afraid to challenge some of the positions that are not supported by the research evidence. The book is relatively short (127 pages), but it is crammed with significance. I suspect that it will become an essential must-read book for many clinicians.
The main theme of the book is that we are all essentially interdependent. The relational roots of the mind start from our very first moments, and can only be properly understood in the context of our family (and intergenerational history), and the wider social context. Mental health symptoms do not arise from an individual’s own fallibilities.
Sutton begins by examining the very act of perception, arguing that we give all experiences meaning, based on the existing store of matches. For survival and adaptive reasons, everything we take in is mediated by our early relationships from the very start of life. Every decision we make is based on filtered perceptual information that is largely unconscious. What we notice and how we respond is thus experience-dependent. It would seem that neuronal connections that fit with the mediating frame (of relationships) are reinforced, and those that are not are pruned. (This is the neurobiology of transference.) In this way, Sutton can link ‘seeing, being and identity’. She writes,
‘Essentially, observation is formative: both what we see and how we are seen – consequently, how we see ourselves in t