You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The 1990s were designated ‘The Decade of the Brain’ in the United States. England and Japan had their analogous projects. As the world moved into the millennium, one might say the advance was to a Stage of Meaningful Correspondences; that is, between neurobiological findings and mind. Signal work by neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio, psychologists such as Daniel Stern, synthesists such as Allan Schore and academic clinicians such as Peter Fonagy and Mark Solms began to approach a synergistically critical mass in the last years of the 1990s. As a result, an explosion of new neuroscientific understanding has now burst onto the scene of psychoanalysis of every school and into the consciousnesses of working psychoanalysts. Developmental and especially attachment theory has been rejuvenated, generating an enhanced clinical sensitivity to the most subtle levels of early emotional states and especially to the dynamics of early trauma. Much excitement abounds around this forward-moving current, and there seems an air of tacit expectation that important mysteries of the human mind may finally be solved.
Is this sensed promise too good to be true? What are its limits, where its horizons? Awash in the flood of new findings and new excitement, it is easy to forget that the paradigm that this marriage represents is not new, but more about that later. Although each paper in the arena of neuroscience and psychology qualifies its scope, there seems to be a paucity of literature the sole purpose of which is to critique the field itself, its modus operandi, its findings, its quality control, and specifically its need for caution. This short paper (13 pages) by Dr. Brothers is one such attempt. It is, she says, ‘essentially a summary of [her book] Mistaken Identity (Brothers, 2002). A former neuroscience researcher, an academic and practising psychiatrist, Brothers brings firsthand experience. She addresses the science of mind and brain research itself, which is both the stren