Infant research and neuroscience at work in psychotherapy: expanding the clinical repertoire

While there has in recent years been a huge growth of interest in neuroscience research within the psychotherapy community, there remains considerable uncertainty about whether these new findings, as exciting as many of us find them, really do have serious applications to the psychotherapeutic process. Psychotherapists from a range of diverse theoretical orientations have claimed that contemporary neuroscience findings back up their particular ideas and ways of working. A few psychoanalytic thinkers have harnessed this thinking, including, for example, Green (2003), Schore (2012), and of course Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, and Target (2004), and increasingly we see reference to these ideas in psychoanalytic papers (e.g. Emanuel, 2004; Holmes, 2013). There is also neurospsychoanalysis, including the less developmentally based work of Solms, which has been in part trying to find an empirical neuroscientific basis for many psychoanalytic ideas (Solms & Kaplan-Solms, 2001; Solms & Panksepp, 2012). However, few have written about how this research directly helps them in their work or how it might have changed their therapeutic practice.

This is just what Judith Rustin has attempted to do in this book. Rustin (who incidentally has no links with Margaret or Michael Rustin who may be better known to UK readers) comes from a stable of American psychoanalysis influenced initially by self-psychology and later by more intersubjective approaches. She has been particularly influenced by the work of Beatrice Beebe and colleagues, both the developmental parent–infant findings and also the clinical lessons Beebe and others have drawn from such findings (Beebe & Lachmann, 2002). Rustin sets out in this book to convey her own journey of discovery of the new research and how this has affected how she thinks about and practices psychoanalysis.

One of her overt aims is to describe the brain research that she finds most pertinent and which many clinicians might not have a grip on. Each chapter