Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I am a medical doctor specialized in internal medicine and pain medicine. I bought this book to review the current knowledge of the functional neuroanatomy of attachment disorder, personality disorders, etc, and learn how this might have lately informed the practice of psychotherapy. I found this book to be extremely frustrating. I get the impression that rather than sit down and write a structured book on the subject at hand, Dr. Schore simply gathered a number of his related reviews and essays together under this title. Whatever the case, this lengthy book is a collection of chapters that cover variations of the same material repeatedly. And I mean repeatedly. I now know what that Edvard Munch guy on the bridge was screaming-- "You already said that!" I will give a couple examples of this repetition. Schore says in the introductory chapter that there has been a paradigm shift from a left-brain cognitive-behavioral approach to a right-brained, pre-verbal approach. Great! Let's learn about it! Yet a search of the Kindle version shows that the word paradigm occurs 117 times in the text. It is already toward the end of the text that we read, "At the outset of this contribution I proposed that three trends of the ongoing paradigm shift in the developmental sciences--studies of right brain development, research on emotion, and models of self-regulation....." etc. The same stuff about this paradigm shift is repeated over and over ad nauseum. Example two. Search on auditory-prosodic. 19 separate times spread throughout the chapters is repeated the same discussion on the role of "episodes of visualfacial, auditory-prosodic, and tactile-gestural affective communications" between infant and attuned caregiver in forming normal right-brain attachment psychology. This is a central topic that needed to be fully developed and referenced one time in one chapter. I could go on and on. 33 separate places the story about HPA axis regulation is repeated. The phrase right brain or right hemisphere occurs well over 1000 times. There is a lot of interesting material covered in this tome, such as the study on Borderline Personality Disorder and the chapter on Bowlby. But so much of these 480 pages is needless repetition that I suspect the author of being motivated by something other than a goal to present the material in a clear fashion. It feels more like he was tasked to come up with something prodigious for the Norton Series. Gravity equals gravitas. His own name, Schore, is referenced 582 times. So maybe this is just an accomplished academician running victory laps--many victory laps. Whatever. The irritation this book caused me results in a 2 star rating. Speaking of the right brain, the functional MRI scan has recently created an explosion of knowledge of dynamic functional neuroanatomy. Perhaps this knowledge will lead to some progress in psychological therapies. But there is a limit to the usefulness of neuroanatomical explanations, which, ironically enough, goes directly to the paradigm shift from cognitive to intuitive psychotherapy that is the topic of this book. Any configuration of neural matrix activity that one might label as a thought, emotion, sensation, feeling-- what have you-- can be imaged with fMRI. One may experience an aha! moment where the activity of visualizing where the enjoyment of an Oreo cookie occurs in the brain suddenly crosses from the novel to the banal; every brain function occurs somewhere in the brain, and suddenly we are back to square one. The academic activity of categorizing cortical and subcortical regions and nuclei is just a left brain, language-based heuristic after all. We still have to engage that realm of intuitive limbic communication with the client. So, when the goal is connecting with another human, all this talk about the right brain has the same function as talking about Chakras. It is the human compulsion to explain with the left brain what is intuited by the right brain but is in practice ineffable. So, whereas Dr. Shore might recognize in my review a sympathetic nervous system discharge causing increased blood pressure and a right brain rage response, I will describe this review as venting my spleen, and claim it to be the more apt description. Which leads to my last comment about this book, which might just be a nitpick. Nothing is more left brainy than academic jargon. Consider the following sentence: "The attuned mother synchronizes the spatiotemporal patterning of her exogenous sensory stimulation with the infant's spontaneous expressions of his endogenous organismic rhythms." 480 pages of this style of writing. It's curious to read a book about the limits of an overly cognitive approach to human psychology written in this style.