Increasing executive and "self-soothing" capacities in the treatment of addictive disorders.

Freud noted many years ago (1917/1963, 1933/1964) that the talking cure was developed due to the rather primitive nature of neuroscientific knowledge with regard to the brain and hence might eventually be made unnecessary or irrelevant by subsequent discoveries of the neuropsychological causation of neurotic symptoms. The opposite may be true, however. These discoveries may validate the potential effectiveness of therapeutic work with a wide variety of difficult personality disorders and addictive forms of pathology. The recent work of neuroscientists such as Barkley, Davidson, Goldberg, Schore and Volkow and Fowler may allow for empirical demonstrations of benign changes in brain functions following an effective course of treatment.