The Neuroscience of Human Relationships
How attachment and the social brain shape human bonds.
There are no single human brains; brains only exist within networks of other brains.
Louis Cozolino builds a textbook that reads the brain as an organ assembled and revised through relationship. Working upward from neurons and synapses to attachment systems, laterality, memory, and the regulation of fear and shame, he treats neural networks as records of early bonds and later repair. The prose stays anchored in clinical material, so each system connects to what shows up between two people in a room.
For the practitioner, the payoff is a working vocabulary that ties observable process to underlying biology: symptoms recast as adaptations of networks shaped under particular caregiving conditions, and the therapeutic relationship itself understood as a driver of neural integration and plasticity. Chapters on trauma, dissociation, and the biochemistry of attachment give concrete anchors for formulation.
The second edition updates the science throughout, expanding sections on epigenetics and the social synapse, and keeps case vignettes from Cozolino's own practice next to the biology they illustrate.
About the author
Louis Cozolino
Louis Cozolino is an American clinical psychologist and Professor of Psychology at Pepperdine University's Graduate School of Education and Psychology in Los Angeles, where he has taught since 1986. He holds a PhD in clinical psychology from UCLA and a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard. His work connects neuroscience with psychotherapy, attachment and human relationships, and he is the author of The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy. Alongside teaching, he maintains a clinical and consulting practice in Los Angeles.
Details
- 2006
- W. W. Norton
- W. W. Norton, 2nd ed. (2014), 2014
- 656
- 9780393707823