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edited by Linda Mayes, Peter Fonagy and Mary Target, London, Karnac Books, 2007, 406 pp., £29.99 (paperback).
This book is the first volume to be published in the ‘Developments in psychoanalysis series’ edited by Linda Mayes, Peter Fonagy and Mary Target. The theme of their series is a focus on advances in psychoanalysis. This book, as the title suggests, concentrates on sharing understandings of human development. It encourages psychoanalysts, developmental cognitive and neuroscientists to inform each other and enrich the field for all of us. In the introduction the authors emphasize how this volume celebrates the renewal of the collaboration between the Yale Child Study Centre and the Anna Freud Centre in promoting psychoanalytic developmental research. The three editors were joined in this volume by 27 other contributors, some of whom will be well known to many readers.
A central focus of psychoanalytic psychotherapy is how people relate to each other and an interest in disturbed modes of relating with their present and past pre-determinants. In addition psychoanalytic psychotherapy focuses on how the ways that a person relates to others can change through the course of psychotherapy, through the medium of the therapist and patient relationship. In contrast, in psychiatry there is often a much greater dichotomy between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’. In the medical model ‘disturbed relating’ is defined in diagnostic categories and is more readily conceptualized as a brain disorder. The brain can then be viewed much more like any other organ and as such this leads to it being thought about in a kind of isolation. As the roots of mental illness are searched for in the microstructure of the brain it becomes more difficult to think of brains relating to each other. However as psychoanalytic psychotherapists perhaps we cannot afford to stray too far in the opposite direction and consider the mind in isolation from the brain. Relating is central; the relating of minds and thus