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Casey Schwartz is a popular journalist who has academic credentials in both neuroscience and psychoanalysis. This is an introduction for lay readers to a burgeoning body of work being done at the borders of these adjoining bodies of thought—work we might think of at this stage as a sort of land-clearing. Schwartz commands a clear, free-flowing style that can be a wonderful medium for untangling intricate concepts and writings (for example: she presents almost in passing a concise summing-up of Freud's “Project for a Scientific Psychology” that strikes me as startlingly accurate, clear, and fair). She leads us into this terrain hesitantly at first, reporting her own second thoughts and backtracking as she proceeds. It's a narrative strategy one's come to identify as bloggish—and to tire of pretty quickly—but it soon repays the reader's patience handsomely; you may be surprised at how well prepared you are to follow the interpenetration of these systems of thought when she begins to present it.
She reads voraciously, but then she also finds a couple of interesting people to ask questions of and pay extended attention to as they search for an intellectual territory where these two ongoing endeavors could proceed together, complementing as well as complicating each other. The first, the South African psychoanalyst Mark Solms, is also a neurosurgeon. She presents