The Dynamic Self in Psychoanalysis: Neuroscientific Foundations and Clinical Cases

The Dynamic Self in Psychoanalysis builds a bridge between two different but intertwined disciplines―psychoanalysis and neuroscience―by examining the Self and its dynamics at the psychological and neuronal level.

Rosa Spagnolo and Georg Northoff seek continuity in the relationship between psychoanalysis and neuroscience, emphasizing how both inform psychotherapy and psychoanalytic treatment and exploring the transformations of the Self that occur during this work. Each chapter presents clinical examples which demonstrate the evolution of the spatiotemporal and affective dimensions of the Self in a variety of psychopathologies. Spagnolo and Northoff analyze the possible use of new neuroscientific findings to improve clinical treatment in psychodynamic therapy and present a spatio-temporal approach that has significant implications for the practice of psychotherapy and for future research.

The Dynamic Self in Psychoanalysis will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, neuroscientists and neuropsychiatrists.

Rosa Spagnolo, MD, is a child neuropsychiatrist, child and adolescent psychotherapist and psychoanalyst based in Italy. She is a member of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society (SPI), the IPA and the NPSA, and co-founder of the Italian Psychoanalytic Dialogues Association. She is the editor of Building Bridges: The Impact of Neuropsychoanalysis on Psychoanalytic Clinical Sessions (Routledge).

Georg Northoff, MD, PhD, FRCP, is a neuroscientist, philosopher, and psychiatrist. He is one of the world’s leading scientists in the field of brain and mind, having established neurophilosophy and, more recently, a novel approach to brain–mind relationship in terms of time–space dynamic. He is the author of Neuropsychoanalysis in Practice (2011) and Neurophilosophy and the Healthy Mind (2016), as well as a Professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada and holds multiple affiliations to universities in Europe and Asia.