Infant Research & Neuroscience at Work in Psychotherapy—Expanding the Clinical Repertoire

This book was written by a long-term traditional psychotherapist, seeing the same clients daily for decades, and interpreting current challenges as early childhood family traumas. The title is misleading; while research on infant development is dovetailed with the psychotheraputic bad-mother, the book's topic is wider. This is a guide for practicing therapists (and lay readers who think in those terms) who need to incorporate the fact that people have bodies, and interact with others in the world. Psychotherapy avoids non-verbal communication, social interaction, body awareness, or the physical aspects of memory and emotion. Because of 1950s behaviorism and pill-popping, the field tends to see anything that treats people as living creatures or social animals as mechanistic, inhuman, and a professional threat. Psychotherapists who treat women as equals have also seen recognizing bodies as a hostile male act. Here, a dedicated psychotherapist recasts basic, fundamental information about non-verbal communication, social interaction, and physical emotion in a form comfortable for traditional psychological therapists. (Her default explanations are neuroscience, but in practice the book is about understanding and using physical and social communication.) The author writes warmly and clearly in the first person, and focuses on storytelling about individual therapists' relationships with a few patients. She alternates stories of how the therapist saw the patient's problem and behaved in response with short explanations of a single physical process (eye contact, the biology of fear, and so on). While some readers will be shocked to realize there are counselors who don't notice body language, don't think about social life, and treat people who have traumatic stress without seeing that fear is physical, the book shows this is the case. It is a vital book for practicing therapists trained in a traditional mode. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)