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While psychoanalysis has generated hypotheses but has not been hypotheses testing the converse could be said of a scientific approach which does not address questions of subjective experiences, complex affects and motivations
The above statement appears in the book's introductory chapter. It offers a challenge to the commonplace view that the ‘objective’ evidence-based sciences and the ‘subjective’ field of the humanities and arts are in a dichotomous rather than a dialectical relationship with one another. This former view is particularly pervasive in the contemporary arena of NHS mental health. In this evidence-based culture, it is well documented that psychoanalytically oriented therapy has found itself in a weaker position than for example CBT, whose effects are more easily measured. The qualitative ‘subjective’ data of psychoanalytic work, interpreted from within a framework that recognizes the power of the unconscious, has been difficult to translate into measurable ‘facts’ that can speak to a wider audience. Does this then mean that the data observed, experienced and collated over the whole process of an intensive therapy is not ‘scientifically’ produced or is irrelevant to science?
‘Emotional Development in Psychoanalysis, Attachment Theory and Neuroscience’ is a timely and significant work, which moves beyond these dichotomies, through a dialectical process, into the realm of integration. It brings to the fore two rich canons of understanding about the growth of the self and what aids or undermines human development. This is something which psychoanalytically informed practice has needed for a long time, ever since Freud began ‘The Project for a Scientific Psychology’ (1895), which was never actually published in his lifetime, and which was finally abandoned, due to the lack of available techniques for studying brain functioning. However, over the last decade, technological advances in brain scanning: EEG, imaging and mapping, have helped neuroscience