The Unconscious, A Bridge Between Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Neuroscience, edited by Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber, Simon Arnold, and Mark Solms,  Routledge, London and New York, 2016,  234 pp.

For most of the 20th century the unconscious was equated with the clinical and conceptual work of Freud and psychoanalysis and an untouchable subject for any neuroscientific study. The arrival of new technologies to examine the living human brain and of more exquisite conceptualizations of the functioning of the mind made the exploration of the phenomena of consciousness and unconsciousness a “hot” topic for cognitive neuroscience and led to a greater appreciation of subjective experience.

This makes The Unconscious: A Bridge Between Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Neuroscience a timely publication. It contains the main papers of the 15th Joseph Sandler Research Conference, which took place in 2014 in Frankfurt, Germany, where leading interdisciplinary researchers as well as practicing psychoanalysts and psychotherapists discussed the differences between conceptualizations of the unconscious in psychoanalysis and cognitive neuroscience. In particular it attempted to address whether the core concepts of psychoanalysis are still relevant in light of recent research findings and what effect this has on treating patients in psychotherapy today.