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The Talking Cure: The Science behind Psychotherapy SUSAN C. VAUGHAN
New York, Grosset/Putnam, 1997 224 pp., $24.95
Does psychotherapy-in this case psychoanalytic psychotherapy-work? This is a common question, forcefully posed (and 'answered') in the 1950s by Hans Eysenck and returned to with increasing force as the pressures of the market and the demands of evidence-based medicine crowd in. Opinions vary.
Dr Vaughan, a psychoanalyst based in New York City, believes it does, but does not try to convince us of this-rather she is concerned to explore how it might exert its effects. Calling upon reflex-arc experiments in sea slugs, developments in parallel processing and artificial neural networks, and PET studies demonstrating association cortex activation during free association, she postulates a `story synthesiser' located somewhere in the association cortex, programmed by early...