The Talking Cure: The Science Behind Psychotherapy Susan C. Vaughan. New York:  G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1997.  208 pp.

The central thesis of this book, announced in the opening pages with something approaching messianic fervor, is that psychoanalysis changes your brain—that intensive psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy is, quite literally, a kind of neurosurgery in which interconnections among neurons in the brain are re-wired, bringing about permanent alterations in the way the patient thinks, feels, acts, and relates to others. “I am a microsurgeon of the mind,” proclaims Vaughan. “A physician psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst by training, I use words and symbols to explore and change the neural landscape of my patients' mind and brains the way a surgeon uses a scalpel to expose and excise problematic structures in the body” (p. 3). Her purpose in this book is to show how and why she can make this claim:

Let me say at the outset that in calling psychotherapy neurosurgery, I am not speaking metaphorically. We now have solid scientific evidence to suggest that the so-called “talking cure,” originally devised by Freud, literally alters the way in which the neurons in the brain are connected to one another…. Recent scientific findings in neurobiology, cognitive science, developmental psychology, and psychotherapy research have made it possible for me, as a modern psychoanalyst, to do something Freud could only dream of: I can

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cast some of Freud's most fundamental psychological ideas in biological terms…. The techniques of psychodynamic psychotherapy—from the use of free association and the exploration of dreams to the probing of the evolving patient-therapist relationship itself—make sense in neuronal terms. I believe the new evidence explains how and why the “talking cure” works at the cellular level. I hope to put the neuron back into neurosis. (pp. 4-5)

Susan Vaughan writes in a conversational style for a popular audience. She interpolates contemporary research in neurophysiology, child development, and psychotherapy in eight chapters, each devoted to a different patient; the c