Both challenging and ambitious, Dr. Sasso’s book deservesto be read by clinical social workers—both therapists andresearchers alike—who are interested in exploring poten-tial bi-directional links between human subjectivity andneurophysiological processes in the brain. Although cer-tainly creatively brave, to echo the praise of Psychoanalystand Clinical Psychologist Mary Target, Sasso’s work is farfrom the first attempt to construct an integrated model ofthe human mind. At the end of the nineteenth century,Freud privately declared his intention to ‘‘furnish a psy-chology that shall be a natural science’’ in a letter to hisgood friend and confidante Wilhelm Fliess (1950a/1887–1902, p. 295). Before developing his now famoustheories concerning the unconscious, infantile sexuality,and the maladies of human civilization, Freud first tried tointegrate clinical observations of hysterical patients withwhat he understood about neurophysiology. This effortresulted in the production of one of his less known andleast popular texts, Project for a scientific psychology(1950b/1895). Owing perhaps to several misconceptionsabout the workings of the nervous system (neurons hadonly been discovered several years earlier), Freud wasultimately unable to integrate biological data with hismetapsychology and abandoned the Project, and alongwith it any attempt to build psychoanalytic theory onquantifiable scientific data. He refused to publish the failedProject and chose instead to establish psychoanalysis as adiscipline in its own right—a task to which he devoted hislife and which earned him a reputation as one of thetwentieth century’s most revolutionary thinkers.While many researchers within both neuroscience andpsychoanalysis argue that we are faced today with the samelimitations recognized by Freud more than a hundred yearsago, Dr. Sasso joins a growing number of ambitiousinterdisciplinary pioneers who believe that the advances ofscience and clinical theory have brought us to a momentFreud anticipated but did not live to see: a time in whichthe advances of neurophysiology may be integrated withcontemporary models of the mind. As its title suggests,Sasso’s work aims to accomplish what Freud could not.In taking Freud’s failed Project as a starting conceptualframework, Sasso assigns himself a mammoth task and thisis reflected in both the complexity of his ideas and diffi-culty of the text. Chapter One, titled ‘‘The cultural inher-itance of Project for a Scientific Psychology,’’ situates thiswork in its historical context and gestures toward the rev-olutionary nature of an integrative model of the mind.Here, Sasso highlights key concepts from Freud’s Projectand their relevance to contemporary neuroscience, partic-ularly the work of Damasio, Edelman, and Tononi.According to Sasso, Freud’s Project failed because, intrying to account for how memory encoding at the neurallevel could give rise to high-order cognitive functions suchrepresentation and language, Freud relied exclusively onconcepts such as ‘‘energy’’ and ‘‘force’’ as these aredescribed by thermodynamics, which was then the leadingdiscipline of the natural sciences. Without the concept of‘‘information’’ which would develop later, the exchangebetween the psychic and the physical was doomed to beunidirectional and, hence, reductionist—a fact Freud cer-tainly recognized but could not circumvent. Anticipatingthe new model of brain development he presents in ChapterFour, Sasso suggests that the concept of bi-directionallyflowing ‘‘information’’ may provide the missing linkbetween mind and brain.