Neuroscience and child psychotherapy
There have been many developments in our understanding of children's psychological and emotional development in recent decades, but no ®eld has altered more dramatically and presented more challenges that that of neuroscience. In this chapter I will outline some of the main developments, in an uncomplicated way, and consider just what impact this new research might have both on our understanding of children's psyches and on how we might actually work clinically with children and adolescents. Of course neuroscience is by no means new to psychoanalysis. Freud himself, with his neurological training, showed enormous prescience in predicting the kind of developments that would not actually occur for another century: `we must recollect that all our provisional ideas in psychology, will presumably some day be based on an organic superstructure' (Freud 1914: 78).