This went well beyond old assumptions about our innate, hardwired limitations. Bush-which brought us a new perspective on the brain as self-renewing, with capacities to rewire itself in response to changing circumstances. Then came the 1990s-“The Decade of the Brain,” as dubbed by President George H. Deep down, unsupported by much scientific evidence to the contrary, many therapists sensed that this simply couldn’t be the whole story of the mind.
We still believed in something Hippocrates had asserted 2,500 years ago: the “mind is what the brain does.” Could our mental lives-our emotions, thoughts, memories, and meaning-making narratives-be nothing more than simply neurons firing off in our head? If our mind was only a brain, we were left with a self-contained, single-skull view of mental life-which implied that our relationship with others, all the richness of human connection, was superfluous to mental functioning.
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If this were true, then a malfunctioning mind was due to dysfunction in a particular region-and short of giving a pill, what could a therapist do to improve that region’s functioning? Luckily, these two axioms would soon be overthrown, as we learned that the brain responds to experience throughout the lifespan by changing its function and structure, and that you could look to the connections of regions-and grow those connections-to understand how to move clients from dysfunction to function, even in adulthood.īut yet another obstacle was getting in the way of our recognizing the fresh possibilities that were opening up. But if this were true, what in the world could we do as psychotherapists that might lead to lasting changes in our clients’ brains? The orthodox teaching in neurobiology also asserted that certain regions “gave rise” to specific mental functions, like memory, mood, and language. What I sampled from the smorgasbord of therapeutic modalities-from family and couples therapy to psychodynamic methods and cognitive-behavioral approaches-seemed to inhabit a world separate from important developments in the broader scientific community-in fields like neurobiology, child development, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, sociology-that might advance the craft of psychotherapy.Īt that time, we were taught that the brain was fully formed by adulthood. Still, as I started my training, first in pediatrics and then in adult, adolescent, and child psychiatry, I struggled to find a way to combine my fascination with science with what I was learning as a psychotherapy student.
Back then, little was known about the workings of the living, dynamic brain, but by the mid-’80s, technology in the form of CAT scans and MRIs enabled us to see some aspects of neural structure and function inside our previously opaque skull. In 1978, when the Psychotherapy Networker was born, I was just beginning medical school. Editor's Note: In the January 2017 issue, a group of innovators and leaders look back over different realms of therapeutic practice and offer their view of the eureka moments, the mistakes and misdirections, and the inevitable trial-and-error processes that have shaped the evolution of different specialty areas within the field. Here's one reflection.
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