The Brain and the Inner World
The founding text of neuropsychoanalysis, and still the best introduction to it.
The authors display an uncanny ability to translate the obliquity of brain science into a user-friendly package.
Solms and Turnbull set out how findings from lesion studies, affective neuroscience, and dream research map onto the mental apparatus Freud described. They work outward from clinical cases of brain injury, showing how damage to particular systems disturbs drive, emotion, memory, and the sense of self. Their argument is that the deep structures psychoanalysis inferred from the couch have identifiable correlates in the emotional circuitry of the brainstem and limbic system, and that consciousness itself is rooted in feeling before cognition.
For a practising clinician, the book supplies a vocabulary for connecting what happens in the room to underlying affective systems: why drives press, why dreams carry wishful force, why some patients cannot feel what they plainly know. It handles Panksepp's basic emotion systems, mourning, and the neurobiology of repression in terms a therapist can hold alongside a live case. Published in 2002, it stays close to clinical material throughout, which is what lets its claims travel back into the consulting room rather than remaining in the laboratory.
About the authors
Mark Solms
Mark Solms, born in 1961 in present-day Namibia, is a South African psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist. He holds the Chair of Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town and Groote Schuur Hospital, and has served as President of the South African Psychoanalytical Association. He is known for his work on the brain mechanisms of dreaming and for applying psychoanalytic methods within neuroscience, the approach central to neuropsychoanalysis. His book The Hidden Spring examines consciousness and affect. He also directs a new English translation of Freud's complete psychological works.
Oliver Turnbull
Oliver Turnbull is a neuropsychologist and Professor of Neuropsychology at Bangor University in Wales, where he also serves as Deputy Vice Chancellor. His research addresses emotion, emotion-based learning, and the neuroscience of psychotherapy, and it sits within the field of neuropsychoanalysis. He is co-author, with Mark Solms, of The Brain and the Inner World (2002), an introduction to the neuroscience of subjective experience. He also works clinically with patients who have neurological conditions such as stroke and traumatic brain injury.
Details
- 2002
- English
- Routledge
- Routledge, 2002
- 360
- 9781855759824