The book reviews psychoanalytic theory with the aim of developing a evolutionarily feasible model of social behavior and personality that can help to bridge the gap between psychoanalysis and neuroscience.In bringing together various psychoanalytic theories with aspects of ethology, sociology, and behaviorism, the book seeks to overcome the theoretical impasse faced by cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience in their endeavors to understand how the brain has evolved to organize complex social behavior in humans. The book is of academic interest, addressing those working in behavioral sciences who want to gather what can be learned from the rich body of psychoanalytic theory for the sake of advancing the goal shared by all behavioral sciences: to elucidate the principles of regulation of social behavior and personality and understand where and how we can find their neural underpinnings. It advocates that brain-social behavior relationship can only be understood if we learn from and integrate psychoanalytic insights gained across the last century from clinical work by what are often considered to be rival schools of thought. The book should also be of interest to psychoanalysts looking for a systematic and integrative overview of psychoanalytic theories, an overview that reaches across ego psychology, object relations theory, attachment theory, self psychology, and Lacanian theory. The book is not, however, a critique of psychoanalytic theory or a review of its historical development; it emphasizes consistencies and compatibilities rather than differences between psychoanalytic schools of thought.

Understanding how the brain subserves, and has evolved for, seemingly complex social behavior requires an evolutionarily and psychoanalytically informed framework a framework that sets itself apart from cognitivism and speculations about conscious agency or a "self" as an actor. Any position that does not fully discard the idea that conscious phenomena can cause behavior (or that we have free will), hinders advances toward an evolutionarily feasible theory of brain mechanisms of social behavior. Accordingly, a key concern of the book is to seek clarification of the relationship between consciousness, behavior, and brain. This theme, as well as themes concerned with the constituent elements of human social behavior and personality such as aggression, avoidance, anxiety, and reward seeking run through the book, being incorporated into the discussion of the various brain structures and regulatory mechanisms.Psychoanalysis not only emphasizes the primacy of the unconscious in social behavior, it also allows us to relate all forms of social behavior, and its variations into the extremes of psychopathology, to the expression of a few behavior mechanisms that are deeply rooted in the evolution of defensive and reward-seeking behaviors of vertebrates. Advances in biological psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience, reviewed here, illustrate the functioning under extreme conditions of a system that balances and intertwines defensive, aggressive, and reward-seeking motivational processes processes that lie hidden in the interpersonal and cultural fabric of the social world that surrounds us."

This book is for readers who are knowledgeable about the neurosciences and curious about brain mechanisms that produce normal and pathological social behaviour. It is a reference work that presents and reviews facts and recent findings that need to be accounted for within a coherent neuroanatomy and neurophysiology of social behaviour.

This book, concerned with psychoanalytic conceptualisations, helps to lay the foundation for a biologically and evolutionarily sensible model of human social behaviour and personality, and also helps to bridge the gap between psychoanalysis and neuroscience.