Between ourselves: psychodynamics and the interpersonal domain.

that the intellectual fashion in explanations of human nature that has dominated the Englishspeakingworld for the past 20 years is changing. It has become commonplace to claim that the giants who shaped much 20th-century thought (Marx and Freud) are dead, replaced by the evolutionist Darwin. But there are intriguing signs that Freud, at least, was merely sleeping, awaiting a new summons from the faithful. Psychoanalysis is ceasing to sound intellectually disreputable.’ So wrote Professor Steven Rose in a recent book review for the Sunday Times Culture section (7 April 2002: p. 41). He continued: ‘Study groups are springing up across London, lecture courses are packed as a new generation of analysts attempts to forge links with a generation of neuroscientists no longer afraid to contemplate what their science has to say about one of the greatest of human mysteries, the nature of consciousness.’ Can this be true? Are not the newly forged investigative tools of cognitive neuroscience, from beautiful coloursaturated brain scans on the one hand to impenetrably complex computer simulations of mental functioning on the other, serving notice on the mythical melodramas of Freudian and Kleinian theatres of the mind? Let us confine ourselves to the facts. And in the opinion of many, it is a fact that the ‘internal world’ is a world composed of neurons, not the dynamic unconscious. But the modern era of scientific investigation affords an opportunity to think afresh. Perhaps we should heed those voices from the past enjoining us to adopt a truly bio-psychosocial view of the mind and its disorders, encompass a broader sweep of evidence, mobilise our faculties of critical judgement . . . and be prepared to change our ways of seeing things. FORMSOF FACT