ABSTRACT
Bridging neuroscience and psychodynamic points of view involves melding traditions that are very old on the one hand, with a science that is still in its infancy on the other. Neuroscience has hardly been without its own distorting biases on the subject of emotion. Emotion has tended to be modelled in terms of its tie in humans to higher cognitive functions, instead of its tie to mammalian prototypes or emotional "primitives", such as the prototype states of fear, rage, lust, separation distress, play, bonding and nurturing, and other basic social emotions that are part of the matrix of attachment. Psychotherapy training needs to include much more training in neuroscience, especially in clinical and affective neuroscience. Emotions are the vital threads of value that run through the whole neural system. If emotion is the most neglected subject in neuroscience, attachment is the most neglected subject within the large topic of emotion.
