The Brain has a Mind of its Own: Attachment, Neurobiology, and the New Science of Psychotherapy

by Jeremy Holmes

Describing the neuroscientific basis for effective psychotherapy, Professor Holmes draws on the Free Energy Principle, which holds that, through ‘active inference’ -- agency and model revision -- the brain minimises discrepancies between incoming experience and its pre-existing picture of the world. Difficulties with these processes underlie clients’ need for psychotherapeutic help. Based on his relational ‘borrowed brain’ model, and deploying his capacity to communicate complex ideas to a wide audience, Holmes shows us how the ‘talking cure’ reinstates active inference and thus how therapy helps bring about change.

Genres: Nonfiction

208 pages, ebook

Published May 1, 2020

About the author

Jeremy Holmes is a British psychiatrist, born in London in 1943.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_...

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There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Nicky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Drawing on neuroscience and psychotherapy, the author talks about how the brain is designed to keep you safe by predicting the environment. Mental health difficulties therefore come when that prediction/model is rigid and outdated. Therapy is a space to update that model. Interesting and easy to read book.

[Michael Kulyk · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is practically unreadable, and whoever touted this book as being introductory or for the general reading public didn't know what they were talking about. The first chapter is difficult primarily because of the author's seeming inability to appreciate that what's clear to him isn't necessarily clear to the reader i.e. he writes of 'error suppression' as part of top down process but doesn't make clear what this could mean, does it mean suppressing the error or does it mean suppressing error making activity or what ?, I don't know and having read the book still don't know. The other chapters are supposed to be somewhat easier though they too are full of half explanations. The author in my opinion may be well published but going by this book this can't be because of his ability to explain his ideas.
In all my forty odd years of reading in the area of psychoanalysis/psychiatry I have rarely come across work as really awful as this confusion of levels of explanatory abstraction. It's hard to believe that an established psychiatrist/psychotherapist could write something like this and that any publisher worth their name would publish it. My summary of this book is intellectual vomit, a hodgepodge of ideas from different levels of abstraction stuck together resulting in meaningless waffle.
Freud attempted to explain psychological concepts in his early 'Project For a Scientific Psychology' but gave up partly because he regarded neurology as not being sufficiently developed in order to do so. He was however able to develop a 'metapsychology' a psychology to provide an explanatory framework for his clinical concepts and unlike this author he made sure that he didn't confuse these levels of explanation. To do so would have been to produce the sort of mess that this author has produced with this book.