ABSTRACT

This chapter offers a critique of contemporary psychoanalysis. Many favorable, even dramatic changes have occurred within psychoanalysis over the past 50 years. Specialization and broad-based exploration have a place in this field and both are necessary over the long run. For many years, and especially since the 1980s, there has been wide-ranging interest in psychotherapy integration. In absorbing a widening range of source data-from philosophy and from neuroscience, for example, or from case studies as well as systematic psychotherapy research-psychoanalysis builds on its hybrid nature. Coordinated brain and psychotherapy research demonstrating the mutually clarifying and enriching roles of basic and applied science has been considered under the much broader rubric of consilience. Neuroscience provides additional ways for analysts and therapists to think about psychotherapy integration. Cognitive-behavior therapy, the action of which depends predominantly on higher cortical functioning, as a top-down therapeutic approach. Working in Focusing and other mindfulness-and somatosensory-based modalities, patient's mentation often has a unique quality.