The Brain has a Mind of its Own: Attachment, Neurobiology, and the New Science of Psychotherapy

This pioneering text provides a deep theoretical explanation for how psychotherapy helps sufferers overcome trauma, redress relationship difficulties and ameliorate depression.  Describing the neuroscientific basis for effective psychotherapy, Professor Holmes draws on the Free Energy Principle, which holds that, through 'active inference' -- agency and model revision -- the brain minimises discrepancies between incoming experience and its pre-existing picture of the world. Difficulties with these processes underlie clients' need for psychotherapeutic help. Based on his relational 'borrowed brain' model, and deploying his capacity to communicate complex ideas to a wide audience, Holmes shows us how the 'talking cure' reinstates active inference and thus how therapy helps bring about change. AUTHOR: Jeremy Holmes MD was for 35 years a consultant Psychiatrist and Medical Psychotherapist at University College London and North Devon and chaired the psychotherapy faculty of the Royal College of Psychiatrists from 1998 to 2002. He co-founded the psychoanalytic psychotherapy programme at the University of Exeter, where he is Visiting Professor. His many publications include John Bowlby and Attachment Theory, Introduction to Psychoanalysis and Attachment in Therapeutic Practice.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

1 The free energy principle
2 Psychoanalytic resonances
3 Relational neuroscience
4 Free energy and psychopathology
5 Uncoupling top-down/bottom-up automaticity
6 FEP and attachment
7 Therapeutic conversations
8 Practical implications for psychotherapists

Epilogue
Glossary of terms
Acknowledgements
References
Index

'Professor Holmes is doing something important here, which is to bring psychoanalysis up to date in the light of what is now known about how brains grow and change in complexity across the life span and in different environments and situations. [...] Jeremy Holmes has worked in the field of complex relational psychopathology for over thirty years and his experience and compassion shines through and illuminates theories that are not easy to follow. I liked this book before it was published and I like it now.'

'This book is a visionary tour de force. It will serve as a guide to every clinician’s thinking. It takes a significant step towards realizing Freud’s ambition of establishing a viable neuroscientific model for psychotherapy. It is one of the most valuable contributions to the field this Century.'

'If Sigmund Freud were working now, he would be advising us to read this rich and thought-provoking new book. The examples are profound and beautiful; and Jeremy’s work is a reminder that psychotherapy will always be both an art and a science.'

'The Free Energy Principle is the cutting edge of modern neuroscience. It is also notoriously difficult to grasp. Here, Jeremy Holmes explains it in terms that psychotherapists can understand so easily that it feels as if we always understood it.'

'The meticulous research that has gone into this book and the clarity with which the concepts are expressed generated a feeling in me that what I had been reading was meaningful, important, and did indeed support the statement Holmes makes on the first page that “psychoanalysis still has much to contribute to our understanding of what it is to be human”.'