Chris Frith & Daniel Wolpert (Eds.): The Neuroscience of Social Interaction: Decoding, Imitating and Influencing the Actions of Others. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2004. ISBN: 0-19-852926-0,  364 pp., $79.50/£37.00.

This book would be a useful resource for all those in the readership who enjoyed the target article by Douglas Watt (2007) and the related commentaries in the last issue of this journal, focusing on empathy.

The field of social neuroscience continues to develop at a hectic pace, and there is an impetus for psychodynamically orientated clinicians and researchers to engage in active dialogue with social neuroscientists. Given that this book is now approaching four years old, it will no longer serve as a contemporary compendium of references (see the Watt articles and commentaries for some up-to-date citations of this field). It is, however, a useful introduction to the concepts and paradigms of the field.

In addition, Frith & Wolpert's book does offer something unique that has not been provided in more recent social neuroscience tomes. This is the use of a truly dyadic interactional framework to organize the chapters and presentation of experimental work. It has been more common for social neuroscientists to discuss an individual in terms of social-information inputs, outputs, and mediating processes. In contrast, the reader is taken on an interactional journey through Frith & Wolpert's framework: a process of decoding one another's intentions, imitation in the alignment of subjectivities, and, finally, a purely neural account of reciprocal influences on one another. In moving beyond the inputs and outputs of a boxed individual, the information presented in this book can be immediately applied within a neuroscientific consideration of dyadic interactions of interest to therapists (e.g., transference and countertransference within the therapy room, intimacy and connection between couples). Furthermore, the inclusion of developmental perspectives from infant research on mentalization and imitation provides a further dimension of potential reference between psychoanalysts and social neuroscientists.

There are specific topics within each section of the book that are pertinen