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One of my teachers in graduate school was a reknowned child neuropsychologist who frequently made the rounds giving lectures and workshops on learning disabilities and related topics to school and parent groups. One of the points she made is that many school problems that teachers and parents often regard as “psychological” may, in fact, have their origin in the way a child's brain is wired, and that no hideous traumatic parental crime of abuse or neglect is necessarily responsible or contributory. She told us that frequently parents will come up to her after a talk — or sometimes even interrupt it — and protest strenuously the notion that this might be a “brain thing.” They furiously wanted to believe that they are somehow psychogenically responsible, because if something they did “caused” the problem, then maybe something they can do — child analysis, family therapy, better parenting — can “fix” it. Other parents, wanting to totally disown any personal responsibility for their child's school problems, took the other extreme and heartily embraced a caricaturized “blame-the-brain” philosophy. The idea implicit in such a Hobson's choice is that the cause of a learning disorder has to be either “brain damage” or “psychological conflict.” Clearly, the field is in need of correctives to such either-or conceptualizations.
This book takes up the challenge. Despite its title, it is actually long on neuropsychology and short on psychoanalysis, but that is perhaps as it should be. As our knowledge of the neuropsychological roots of behavior and its disorders continues to mushroom, there arises a creeping suspicion among psychodynamically oriented clinicians that these brain jockeys with their blocks and puzzles and T-scopes and functional cerebral maps are trying to put the Freudians out of business. This reviewer's own work, along with that of such writers as David Galin and Rhawn Joseph, has been largely devoted to showing how the neuropsychological and the psychodynamic ap