Coming soon from IPBooks! Minding the Social Brain: A Real World Text for Social Neuroscience by Jay Harris.

On Minding the Social Brain:

 The impulse to tell one’s story doesn’t die easily; it is baked into the brain’s cake by evolution. But storytellers we rely on for prioritizing our collective survival policies may be fortune-tellers who hold our social globe in itchy palms. Commercial media tell stories for gain, and then poll us on the same questions of political, social, and economic policy. Using social neuroscience findings, this book aims for more reliable perspectives on the world we share. Minding the Social Brain shows origins of social institutions in brain structure. The text tells its story in two ways: scientifically explaining how the brain transforms its process into socialized mind; and why we mind (obey) social power. Thus, it explores why we reflect on experience and narrate our story to others as fact and myth.         

            Our exchanges incrementally add to the historical saga of social construction. Each brain’s social world develops to encompass both the inherited legacy of survival threats and the ongoing challenges of losing loved ones. Trauma imposed by others induces loss of self. Even seemingly halcyon lives present passages in maturation that makes survival all too stressful.  Narrating our life experience to one another adds personal myth to the social myths of our ‘real world’. With this perspective, Minding the Social Brain aims to clarify and reframe the interaction between social values and the conduct of psychotherapy. In their communication, therapist and patient both have to contend with an identity mélange that provides the setting for contemporary social life.

Reconciling a Freudian frame with social neuroscience findings, I challenge the prevailing belief that the frame is mere metaphor, not a model of the brain’s structure.  Like early Homo sapiens peering into the sky for survival clues, we need a root metaphor and reliable perspective to understand our relation to the cosmos. Social neuroscientists have opened luminous portals into our brain’s social structure that reveal constellations–distributed networks that bring self and other into focus in their indwelling social domain. Matching brain networks with psychological functions, researchers seek a world view that reconciles our social brains’ evolution with the contemporary social world.

COMING SOON FROM IPBooks!  

Reluctant Warriors by Nathan Szajnberg.  

Reluctant Warriors tells of elite citizen-soldiers in action.  These soldiers speak of their inner lives, how they became such a select group of fighters, what it is like to face an enemy, including the ambivalence, hesitance, as well as certitude about protecting their families, most of whom live within kilometers of the battlefield that is Israel.  All these men chose to leave active military service, but continued as officers in the reserves. The author, a psychoanalyst, interviewed these soldiers over the years of the Second Intifada and Lebanese War. Each one had some family member or friend killed.  They speak and want to be heard.  The real action for these men is their inner reactions: fears and hopes and memories that will not rest.

“A searing account of the pre-army lives and army experiences of .. mostly kibbutz-raised Israeli soldiers, recounted with a tender love and a disciplined discernment that brings the reader to a distinctive combination of passionate identifications and objective understandings of the unique transformations from adolescence into a matured adulthood that marks the Israeli … experience.”

Robert S. Wallerstein, M.D.
Emeritus Professor, UCSF and former Chair of Psychiatry, UCSF.
Former President of the International Psychoanalytic Association.

MARGARET MAHLER: A BIOGRAPHY OF THE PSYCHOANALYST
By Dr. Alma Halbert Bond
McFarland Publishers ISBN: 978-0-7864-3355-1

Forced to flee anti–Semitism, Margaret Mahler and her husband Paul came to the United States in 1938. Here Mahler performed her most significant research and developed concepts such as her ground-breaking theory of separation-individuation. This volume depicts Mahler’s life and work, her psychoanalytic contributions and ambivalent relationships with her colleagues.

Available at www.Mcfarlandpub.com, Amazon.com, BN.com,  http://alma_bond.tripod.com or in any bookstore. $45

$27.50 + shipping/handling.

 

 

Freud reminded us that theory was good but did not prevent reality from happening.  Sylvia Brody once more advances analytic understanding by maintaining relentless discipline in studying lives as they actually unfold.  This new rich and readable account of several lives studied across decades exposes and explores essential aspects of mental functioning now too often neglected.–‑Warren S. Poland, M.D.

With clarity, and drawing on observational evidence, Brody brings mother‑infant interaction and its impact on subsequent development to the center stage of psychoanalytic theory.–‑Peter Blos, Jr., M.D.

This is a book not to be missed by anyone who works with children.  It provides an incisive history of infancy research and a longitudinal study of development from birth to age 18.–‑Arlene Kramer Richards, Ed.D.