Main description:

This book presents a comprehensive neuropsychodynamic strategy for treating psychiatric disorders. Rather than pursuing an exclusively biological, psychological, or psychodynamic approach, it offers a methodology that links all three aspects in a unifying, integrative model. Central to this approach is the view of the brain as a bio-psychosocial organ in a neuro-ecological model, rather than the purely neuronal model often presupposed in current neuroscience and psychiatry. Moreover, the book views psychopathological symptoms as spatiotemporal disorders of the altered spatiotemporal structure spanning the brain and its surrounding world. The relation between one of the core symptoms and altered neuronal activity calls for the development of integrated, circular neuropsychodynamic models of psychopathological symptoms in severe psychiatric disorders and their treatment.

Contents:

I Neuropsychodynamic Foundations.- Why neuropsychodynamic psychopatology?.- Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience: The development of Neuropsychoanalysis.- Social embedded brain and relational self.- Threedimensional neuropsychodynamic model of mental disorders and defence mechanisms.- II Basic psychoanalytic concepts and their development.- Unconscious.- Childhood, adolescence and development.- Affects.- Transference and countertransference.- III Neuropsychodynamics of psychiatric disorders.- Schizophrenia and other psychoses.- Depressive syndroms.- Manic and bipolar syndroms.- Anxiety disorders.- Obsessive-compulsive disorders.- Somatisation and bodily distress disorder.- Anorexia and Bulimia.- Traumatogenic disturbances.- Personality disorders.- Dissociative syndroms.- Addiction.- IV Neuropsychodynamic Perspectives.-Principles of neuropsychodynamic therapy.- Acute psychiatric wards.- Neuronal substrates of depression: implications for psychotherapy.- Mood disorders units.- Day clinic models.- Day clinic treatment for depression and anxiety disorders.- Psychoanalytic therapy of Borderline-Personality-Disorder in day-clinic-setting.- Neuropsychodynamics and creative therapy.- Neuropsychodynamic musictherapy.- Four psychotherapeutic settings.- Psychotherapy, Psychopharmacotherapy, and Neuromodulation.- Psychotherapy research in the context of neurosciences.- Concepts of empirical and clinical research in Psychoanalysis and Neuropsychodynamic Psychiatry.- Dreams.- Chronic depression Leuzinger.- Neurophilosophy and Neuroethics.- Outlook: Neuropsychodynamic Psychiatry and the impact of therapeutical relationships.