Overview
The book focuses on the brain structures that are essential for the formation of relationships, personality development, and emotions. It attempts to provide an understanding of the way that the uniquely human nervous system develops capacities for empathy, mentalization, and reflection that enable us to address such aspects as past and presence, interpersonal relations, ethics, art, and aesthetics. Each chapter seeks to present the necessary knowledge for an understanding of our inherent neural basis for interpersonal interactions. The individual chapters can be read independently. Some passages will be more demanding than others and may be safely skipped without rendering the rest of the text meaningless.
Editorials
From the Publisher
“This is the best introduction to neuroscience for psychodynamic psychotherapists available today. It is sophisticated, comprehensive, up-to-date and at many points inspirational. It is accessible but never at the expense of oversimplification. It is highly informative, eschews speculation and is unusually clear in highlighting continuing gaps in our knowledge. This is an immensely valuable addition to all our libraries and is an ideal text for psychological therapists wishing to understand more about the revolution of knowledge that has taken place in neuroscience.”“In the last few decades the study of the brain and nervous system and its relationship to psychology has accelerated at a furious pace. The amount we have learned in those few years is greater than the sum of what was learned in all of the centuries prior. This exploding body of knowledge has led to a growing library on the relevance of neuroscience to psychological trauma and attachment. Unique among these books is Susan Hart’s Brain, Attachment, Personality. Hart has brought a fresh and particularly grounded view to the surprisingly young field of attachment and neuroscience, enlightening the reader to the cutting edge and overlaps of both disciplines. At the book’s core, Hart takes on complicated theories and explains them with clarity while exposing varying views of critical controversies.”