My perspective on Beutel & Huber's article is derived from my training as a doctor, a psychiatrist, and a (developmental) Jungian analyst and from my clinical work, undertaking psychoanalytic psychotherapy with patients with severe and enduring mental illness, in the public sector in England.

The article is a declaration of the current state of play of functional neuroimaging research in relation to both the understanding and the evaluation of psychotherapy. In setting out the methodology of functional imaging and those neuroimaging paradigms relevant to psychoanalysis, as well as the state of current research on brain changes following psychotherapy, Beutel & Huber are clearly hoping to open an avenue of communication and dialogue between two disciplines—psychoanalysis and neuroscience—operating from very different philosophical, scientific, and linguistic frames of reference. From their different vertices, each discipline