Psychoanalysis Neuroscience And The Stories Of Our Lives

Psychoanalysis, Neuroscience and the Stories of Our Lives: The Relational Roots of Mental Health offers a new understanding of identity and mental health, shining the light of twenty-first century neurobiology on the core tenets of psychoanalysis. Accessibly written, it outlines the great leaps forward in neuroscience over the past three decades, and the consequent implications for understanding mental health symptoms today. Central to the book is the idea that the seeds of mental illness are discovered not in the individual’s own fallibilities, but in the complex relationships we experience from our very first moments. Integrating the latest neuroscientific research, it depicts the individual as inherently interdependent with their environment, their neurobiological and emotional foundations framed by the context in which they are raised. Integrating traditional psychoanalytic ideas with findings from neurobiology and neuroscience, it reframes the oedipal set up, examines clinical depression as the presence of absence, and revisits resistance and the neurobiology of denial. Weaving narratives drawn from clinical practice, and highlighting implications for contemporary lives, the book is a tour de force, smashing the myth that our minds develop separately from the world around us. This clear, lucid book, providing a timely overview of emotional and neurobiological development, will appeal to both psychologists and psychoanalysts. It will be also be a key reference work for mental health professionals, particularly those working in early years services.

The book gathers some papers concerning the dialogue between neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Following the Introduction written by Georg Northoff, concerning the possibility of overcoming the highly impasse generating contraposition between localizationism and holism, G. Vaslamatzis deals with a “Framework for a new dialogue between psychoanalysis and neurosciences”. In this chapter the author describes three points of epistemological congruence: firstly, dualism is no longer a satisfactory solution; secondly, cautions for the centrality of interpretation (hermeneutics); and, thirdly, the self-criticism of neuroscientists. David W.Mann in his contribution “The mirror crack’d: dissociation and reflexivity in self and group phenomena” tries to show how reflexive processes generate each of three levels of the human system (self, relationships, group) and integrate them one to another, while dissociative processes tend throughout to pull them apart. Health and illness within the self, the relationship and the group can be understood as special states of the dynamic equilibria between these cohesive and dispersive trends. In “Sleep, memory and plasticity” Matthew P. Walker and Robert Stickgold outline a review of the researches following the discovery of rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM (NREM) sleep, and specifically of those that began testing the hypothesis that sleep, or even specific stages of sleep, actively participated in the process of memory development. The last two chapters, “Clinical implications of neuroscience research in PTSD” by Bessel A. Van Der Kolk, and “Dysregulation of the right brain: a fundamental mechanism of traumatic attachment and the psychopathogenesis of PTSD” by Allan N. Schore, demonstrate how the psychopathology of traumatic conditions can be a fertile field of dialogue between neuroscience and psychoanalysis.

Can we ‘stand inside’ new thoughts, rather than outside, looking at a closed box? This innovative and interdisciplinary collection aims to answer this question by broadening the way we look at and work with psychoanalytic ideas. By examining these ideas through the lenses of other disciplines, the contributors reveal what can be found when ‘boundaries’ are breached and bridges are built in psychoanalytical thought. Judith Edwards here calls upon international analysts, psychotherapists and other professionals to explore the concepts of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ in psychoanalysis, boldly challenging existing boundaries. In this unique and ground-breaking collection, chapters are written by a mathematics professor, a sculptor, film-makers, anthropologists from Australia and Canada, an Ofsted inspector, a neuroscientist and two Chinese psychotherapists. The book emphasises the importance of listening across disciplinary lines, and crossing frontiers within psychoanalysis itself, by integrating psychoanalytic elements with poetry, music, literature, quantum physics, cultural studies and education. Edwards presents this original and global research with authority, showing us how these fields intersect and produce new understandings in us all that allow us to grow and benefit from new perspectives. This collection is unlike no other in its interdisciplinary and international approach. It will be an essential tool for all psychoanalysts, including those in training, as well as psychotherapists and psychotherapeutically-engaged scholars. It will also be of immense interest to academics and students of interdisciplinary studies, psychosocial studies, cultural studies and film studies.

A revelatory new theory of consciousness that returns emotions to the center of mental life. For Mark Solms, one of the boldest thinkers in contemporary neuroscience, discovering how consciousness comes about has been a lifetime’s quest. Scientists consider it the "hard problem" because it seems an impossible task to understand why we feel a subjective sense of self and how it arises in the brain. Venturing into the elementary physics of life, Solms has now arrived at an astonishing answer. In The Hidden Spring, he brings forward his discovery in accessible language and graspable analogies. Solms is a frank and fearless guide on an extraordinary voyage from the dawn of neuropsychology and psychoanalysis to the cutting edge of contemporary neuroscience, adhering to the medically provable. But he goes beyond other neuroscientists by paying close attention to the subjective experiences of hundreds of neurological patients, many of whom he treated, whose uncanny conversations expose much about the brain’s obscure reaches. Most importantly, you will be able to recognize the workings of your own mind for what they really are, including every stray thought, pulse of emotion, and shift of attention. The Hidden Spring will profoundly alter your understanding of your own subjective experience.

Finding Your Way with Your Baby explores the emotional experience of the baby in the first year and that of the mother, father and other significant adults. This updated edition is informed by latest research in neuroscience, psychoanalysis and infant observation and decades of clinical experience. It also includes important new findings about how the mother’s brain undergoes massive restructuring during the transition to parenthood, a phenomenon that has been named ‘matrescence.’ The authors engage with the difficult emotional experiences that are often glossed over in parenting books – such as bonding, ambivalence about the baby, depression and the emotional turmoil of being a new parent. Acknowledgement and understanding of this darker side of family life offer a sense of relief that can allow parents to harness the power of knowing, owning and sharing feelings to transform situations and break negative cycles and old ways of relating. With real-life examples, the book remains a helpful resource for parents, as well as professionals interested in ideas from psychoanalytic clinical practice including health visitors, midwives, social workers, general practitioners, paediatricians and childcare workers.

This book examines how drama therapists conceptualize and respond to relational and systemic trauma across systems of care including mental health clinics, schools, and communities burdened by historical and current wounds. This second edition of Trauma-Informed Drama Therapy: Transforming Clinics, Classrooms, and Communities offers a broad range of explorations in engaging with traumatic experience, across settings (clinical, educational, performance) and geographies (North America, Germany, Sri Lanka, South Africa, India, Belgium), and methodologies (Sesame, DvT, ethnography, performance, CANY, Self Rev). Each effort runs into obstacles, resistances, biases, and random events that highlight the authors’ passion and courage. No solutions are to be found. No grand schemes are proposed. Just hard work in the face of impenetrable truth: we are still at the beginning of understanding how to achieve an equitable, moral, accountable, healthy collective being-with. Confronting trauma, listening to victim testimonies, sitting with unsettling uncertainty, understanding the enormity of the problem, are difficult tasks, and over time wear people down. The chapters in this book belie this trend as they illustrate how the passion, creativity, faith, and perseverance of drama therapists the world over, each in their own limited way, can help. In each of these chapters you will read about people who have been pushed to the margins of existence, and then, how drama therapists have worked to remind them of their immutable, unique value that can transcend and transform those margins into spaces of care, power, and possibility. It will be useful for creative arts therapists, mental health professionals, educators, students and many others interested in the role of the drama and performance in the treatment of trauma.

Sleep problems are among the most common, urgent and undermining troubles parents meet. This book describes Dilys Daws' pioneering method of therapy for sleep problems, honed over 40 years of work with families: brief psychoanalytic therapy with parents and infants together. Offering tried and tested ways of helping parents work things out better with their babies when such problems arise, this new edition of Dilys Daws’ classic work, updated with expert help from Sarah Sutton, frees professionals from the burden of feeling they need to rush to give advice to families, showing instead how to begin the challenging journey of discovering new emotions that every baby brings. It sheds light on the sleep problem in the context of a whole range of aspects of the early world: the regulation of babies’ physiological states; dreams and nightmares; the development of separateness; separation and attachment problems; and connections with feeding and weaning. This much-needed, compassionate and well-informed guide to helping parents and babies with sleep problems draws on twenty-first century development research and rich clinical wisdom to offer ways of understanding sleep problems in each individual family context, with all its particular pressures and possibilities. It will be treasured by new parents struggling with sleeplessness and is enormously valuable for anyone working with parents and their babies.

Neuroscience and psychoanalysis are historically opposed responses to the age-old quest to understand ourselves—one focused on the brain and the other on the mind. As part of a pioneering program to look for common ground between the two warring disciplines, Casey Schwartz spent one year immersed in psychoanalytic theory at the Anna Freud Centre, and the next year studying the brain among Yale’s cutting-edge neuroscientists. She came away with a clear picture of the distance between the two fields: while neuroscience is lacking in attention to lived experience, psychoanalysis is often too ephemeral and subjective. Armed with this awareness, Schwartz set out to study the main pioneers in the emerging and controversial field of neuropsychoanalysis. With passion and humor, she makes a trenchant argument for a hybrid scientific culture that will allow the two approaches to thrive together.