Mindbrain, Psychoanalytic Institutions, and Psychoanalysts: A New Metapsychology Consistent with Neuroscience, by Antonio Imbasciati.  Karnac Books, London, 2017.  241pp.

This book is both a good synthesis of the work and ideas of Antonio Imbasciati and a good opportunity for the reader to reflect upon the current state of psychoanalysis. The author is an Italian psychoanalyst and scholar with broad experience teaching psychoanalysis at the university level and trying to bridge the gap between this teaching environment and that of psychoanalytic institutes. This specific experience

is well reflected in the book, where there is an effort to debate the scientific perspective of psychoanalysis, its relation to research, neuroscience, and cognitive science, as well as the search for a unified metapsychology that can bring together the developments of different psychoanalytic schools. The author shows a vast knowledge not only of the Italian, French, and British, but also both South and North American psychoanalytic developments, always trying to bring them together with neurosciences.

In a previous book, Constructing a Mind: A New Base for Psychoanalytic Theory (Imbasciati, 2006), the author had already advanced, from a developmental perspective, a kind of new unified theory for psychoanalysis, with a special emphasis on Melanie Klein's and Wilfred Bion's contributions and bringing together knowledge derived from developmental and cognitive research and new insights from the neurosciences. One might say that the reader will find in the current book the evolution of previous work by the author, with emphasis on the parallel development of cognitive and affective, bridging the gap between psychoanalysis, developmental theory, and neuroscience. The following quote gives the general idea of the book: “The mind of each individual works in a different way from that of everyone else, as experience or primary functional learning has been different for every single child. Each brain has learned its way of learning. All this is anything but conscious” (p. 20). This might not be the usual psychoanalytical language or a common theme, but it is qui