The third edition of the book is foreworded by Jakub Przybyła who criticizes the idea of integrating neurobiology and psychotherapy based mainly on the study of psychoanalysis and neuropsychoanalysis. The author tackles philosophical and methodological problems which arise from attempts to carry out this integration. Parallel issues of psychoanalytic psychotherapy practice are also addressed. He presents the view that integration can result with a harmful reduction. It also proposes a look at the relationship between psychotherapy and neurobiology as an area of cooperation that avoids the confusion of theoretical languages thanks to the separability of research planes of both domains. This separation results in a kind of dualism and instrumentalism. The book, after the first two chapters written respectively by Georg Northoff and Grigoris Vaslamatzis, introducing some unavoidable theoretical questions this interdisciplinary dialogue has to face, presents four chapters in which as many basic clinical areas, dissociation, sleep and dream, post-traumatic conditions and infant research, constitute the main topics. David Mann tries to show how reflexive processes generate each of the levels of the human system (relationship, human substance and group) and integrate them one to another, while dissociative processes tend throughout to pull them apart. Matthew Walker and Robert Stickgold explore one of the most exciting hypotheses about the functions of sleep, i.e. that of the contribution of sleep to processes of memory and brain plasticity. Bessel van der Kolk examines how the research showing how exposure to extreme stress affects brain function is making important contributions to understanding the nature of traumatic stress. Allan Schore integrates recent advances in attachment theory, affective neuroscience, developmental stress research, and infant psychiatry in order to delineate the developmental precursors of post-traumatic stress disorder.
