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It is an exciting and pivotal time in the development of psychoanalytic thinking. Our field has been enriched by attachment and infant research, complexity theory, and neuroscience. But it can also be a confusing time. The brain is an enormously complex dynamic system with the mind an emergent property of that system, and our professional training did not prepare us to think in the language of non-linear dynamics and affective neuroscience. In Coming into Mind, Margaret Wilkinson asks how much neuroscience do we really need to know to be well informed and ground our theories and practice in these new discoveries. If we read Damasio, Edelman, LeDoux, Panksepp, Porges, Schore, Seigel, Solms, and van der Kolk, for example, will we find that their work supports Jung's views and our contemporary practices? These are not easy questions to answer, and Wilkinson's struggle is evident throughout her very timely book.
After addressing the question ‘Why Neuroscience?’ in Chapter 1, Wilkinson introduces the uninitiated to reader-friendly ‘Brain Basics’ in Chapter 2. Chapter 3, ‘The Early Development of the Brain-Mind’, builds on the idea that the mind as ‘associative, relational, and implicit’ is ‘a developmental achievement’ (p. 32) dependent on early attachment patterns. After introducing different memory systems in the brain (Chapter 4), Wilkinson explains how information processing gets disrupted in trauma.
Chapter 5, ‘The Fear System and Psychological Kindling’, pays close attention to how the amygdala and a cascade of responses to threat can cause emotional dysregulation. She also notes what the therapist might do to quell her patient's hyperarousal via interactive regulation and analytic holding, right-brain to right-brain communication, and emotionally attuned interpretations focused on the here-and-now. ‘Un-doing Dissociation’ (Chapter 6) is an important chapter with a strong clinical focus that highlights Jung's relevance to contemporary trauma studies, especially the d