You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S NOTE
We are sorry to inform our readers of the death of the author of one of the books discussed in the following review, Dr. Leo Rangell, on May 28, 2011, at the age of ninety-seven. Dr. Rangell had the opportunity to read this review and was pleased to know of its publication. His important contributions to psychoanalysis over the years are too numerous to list here; his passing is a significant loss to the field and a personal one to his many colleagues and friends as well.
There is increasing interest among psychoanalysts in the contributions from neuroscience to our understanding of the complex, fascinating, ever-surprising, bio-psycho-social creatures that we are. The writings of Baron-Cohen, Cozolino, Damasio, Edelman, Gazzaniga, Hofer, Kandel, LeDoux, Llinas, Luria, Pally, Panksepp, Ramachandran, Schacter, Schore, Siegel, Solms, Turnbull, and others intrude increasingly into the reading lists at psychoanalytic institutes. For the most part, they are as complex, demanding, and often recondite as they are informative and exciting.
Oliver Sacks, in contrast, is not only a gifted neurological clinician and thinker, but also a master storyteller who is able to make the abstruse world of neuronal synapses and neural networks come alive as he relates memorable examples of conditions that dramatically highlight the dazzling complexity and the parsimonious simplicity of our nervous