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Readers of this journal are likely to be familiar with the work of Jean Knox, one of its past editors-in-chief, in which she has sought to integrate new developments in the neurosciences with analytical psychology, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy generally. Her focus has been upon the development of the sense of self-agency and the processes, psychological and physiological, that underlie this. She has drawn upon empirical research, cognitive psychology and attachment theory to interrogate and critically examine a number of the assumptions underlying the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Jung and their successors, in particular, she has questioned the assumption, implicit in much analytic theorizing, that complex patterns of psychological functioning are in some manner inherited and innate . Knox uses the growing body of evidence to demonstrate that very complex mental phenomena may arise out of simple neurological systems mediated and imbued with meaning, at least initially, by infants' carers. She describes how the findings of developmental studies and neuroscience adequately account for the human mind as an emergent property of the brain. Crucially, these findings emphasize the central role of relationships, initially with primary carers for example, in the development of mind and a mentalizing capacity.
In the first four chapters of the book Knox provides a closely argued critique of analytic ‘innatist’ ideas that inherited underlying psychobiological structures consistently gives rise to characteristic sorts of imagery or patterns of mentation. Although Jung was at pains to point out that he did not intend this with his concept of the archetypes, his casual use of terms, at times did seem to imply just this. Overall Jung's position is probably more consistent with structuralist ideas: the assumption that innate underlying psychobiological structures have evolved in a way that consistently gives rise to characteristic, complex sorts of imagery and patterns of be