The master and his emissary

Iain McGilchrist, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2009, 534 pp., £11.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0300168921

How times change. In the 1950s Charles Brenner's Elementary textbook of psychoanalysis sold over a million copies, unthinkable today. In my more cynical moments I sometimes wonder whether in our field now writers outnumber readers – everyone is writing books, and no one is reading them. However, every decade or so, a volume appears that makes the mysterious leap from the professional ghetto into the wider cultural field. An example for your reviewer's generation was R.D. Laing's 1960s bestseller The divided self. Almost exactly 50 years later, The master and his emissary – whose first half's subtitle, ‘The divided brain’, echoes Laing – is destined to be another. I urge all recalcitrant readers to peep out from their professional silos and get a copy. It contains really important messages for psychotherapists.

The author is a man of exceptional gifts: Winchester and Oxford scholar, congratulatory First, thrice Fellow of All Soul's, fluent in classical Greek and Latin, French, German and (possibly) Russian. Like many outstanding doctors, he came to medicine ‘late’, after a distinguished career in literary studies, perhaps drawn to psychiatry as the most humanistic (albeit also the most capable of degradation) of the medical specialties.

Exploring the implications of the asymmetry between the brain's Right and Left hemispheres, the book is an extravaganza of dichotomising. Like its subject, it falls into two distinct halves. The first is an account of the neurobiology and psychology of the cerebral hemispheres, based mainly on the classical ‘split brain’ studies of Sperry and others, both on experimental animals and on human subjects. It also includes findings from the contrasting neuropsychology of stroke victims, depending on which hemisphere is affected.

Based on this, McGilchrist constructs two contrasting cerebral ‘personalities’,