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Susan Vaughan has written a book about her “views of mind and brain in a way that would be comprehensible to nonexperts” (p. vi). The Talking Cure is intended for patients, potential patients, and others with little expertise about the relationship between mind and brain and what takes place in psychotherapeutic treatment. The challenge is that such an audience includes just about everybody.
While some of us may have expertise about the psychotherapeutic process or some aspect of neuroscience, it has been next to impossible to develop a language that bridges well or integrates effectively. Philosophers, psychologists, and religious scholars have struggled with these questions from the early Greeks through the Middle Ages and into our present time.
The Talking Cure addresses a need for patient education on the nature of psychotherapy. Vaughan has also tapped into the excitement in our field today as we look to the possibility of making progress on Freud's 100-year-old “Project for a Scientific Psychology.” Advances in neuroscience, infant observation, psychotherapy research, and psychological theory all provide new evidence and working tools to assist in unraveling the “universal knot,” as these mind-body issues were described by Arthur Schopenhauer. Vaughan, in her preface, states, “Perhaps most important, we now know that psychotherapy directly affects the brain. That's right, the brain. If you're tired of ‘Listening to Prozac,’ let me tell you about ‘Talking to Neurons’” (p. xiii).
Vaughan's book could have been titled “In Defense of Psychotherapy,” though such a title would be mistaken. She has had enough with both biological and psychological reductionism or elitism. While her ways of relating the mind and brain back together may be a bit of a leap here and there, and conceptually may be something of a patchwork quilt, she is at least willing to examine the terrain and discuss what needs to be explored. And she does so in a way that is very informative and inter