Enriching Psychoanalysis: Integrating Concepts from Contemporary Science and Philosophy. Edited by John Turtz and Gerald J. Gargiulo.  Routledge, 2023.  151pp.

Psychoanalysis is a science conducted by lunatics for lunatics.

As a specialist science, a branch of psychology—a depth psychology or psychology of the unconscious—it [psychoanalysis] is quite unfit to construct a Weltanschauung of its own: it must accept a scientific one.

The opposing ideas in these two epigrams frame the theme of the book at hand. John Turtz and Gerald Gargiulo have edited a collection of essays in a new book for Routledge's series Philosophy and Psychoanalysis that has the goal of deepening the dialogue between psychology and contemporary science. Their efforts open a new vein of inquiry about the infusion of contemporary scientific theory into psychoanalytic thought and practice. Both editors contribute their own scientific theories to the collection and maintain a consistent thread of thought throughout the book. The purpose of the collection is the question best implied in John Dell'Aglio's essay “Neuropsychoanalysis: What, How, and Why”: What kind of science can best enrich psychoanalysis?

This volume consists of six separate pieces organized into four parts: Quantum Theory and Psychoanalysis; Nonlinear Dynamic Systems Theory and Psychoanalysis; Epigenetics; and Neuropsychoanalysis. I hope to help the prospective readers as they foray into this rarified universe of thought. In the first essay, “New Models for the Clinical Unconscious,” Gargiulo takes on the significant challenge of summarizing the basic concepts of quantum physics and of then applying them usefully to the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. The focus in this first essay, both theoretical and clinical, is the theory of the unconscious. Most psychoanalytic theory holds that the unconscious is the part of the mind that stores feelings, thoughts, and urges of which the individual is unaware. In Freudian phraseology, the unconscious has traditionally been understood as the repressed contents that have