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In Psychoanalysis as Biological Science: A Comprehensive Theory, John Gedo continues to elaborate his idiosyncratic, interesting, and opinionated view of psychoanalysis from a singularly prolific retirement, adding another enjoyable contribution to his huge opus of twenty books and over one hundred papers. In this slim, readable volume, he addresses his attention to the neurobiological basis of psychoanalysis and supports his ideas, some of which will be familiar to readers of his previous work, with references to recent advances in the neurosciences and related disciplines. This book is a decisive, dogmatic, and doctrinaire description of his comprehensive approach to psychoanalysis, based on his integration of things old and new, including cognitive neuroscience, neuropsychiatry, self psychology, and what looks to this reader like a version of ego psychology.
At its core, Gedo's theory rests on what for some might seem an old-fashioned conceptualization of development that is linear, genetically preprogrammed, hierarchical, and directly correlated with cerebral anatomy. This is juxtaposed with a similarly hierarchical developmental sequence of self-organizations. Every developing individual moves through the stages of mental and associated brain development as follows: tension regulation (Mode I, lower centers); self-organization (Mode II, right hemisphere); reality testing (Mode III, left hemisphere); conflict resolution (Mode IV, integrated cortex); and expectable adult functioning (Mode V, prefrontal cortex), (Gedo derives his theory of psychopathology from this foundational idea:
Psychopathology is best understood in terms of developmental considerations, for each developmental phase (defined as a mode of organization of the central nervous system) corresponds to a distinct cluster of apraxic and dyspraxic possibilities, whenever its challenges are poorly met. [p. 59]