Most psychological disorders involve distressful emotions, yet emotions are often regarded as secondary in the etiology and treatment of psychopathology. This book offers an alternative model of psychotherapy, using the patient’s emotions as the focal point of treatment. This unique text approaches emotions as the primary source of intervention, where emotions are appreciated, experienced, and learned from as opposed to being regulated solely. Based on the latest developments in affective neuroscience, Dr. Stevens applies science-based interventions with a sequential approach for helping patients with psychological disorders. Chapters focus on how to use emotional awareness, emotional validation, self-compassion, and affect reconsolidation in therapeutic practice. Interventions for specific emotions such as anger, abandonment, jealousy, and desire are also addressed. This book is essential reading for clinicians practicing psychotherapy, social workers and licensed mental health counselors, as well as anyoe interested in the emotional science behind the brain.

Some investigators have argued that emotions, especially animal emotions, are illusory concepts outside the realm of scientific inquiry. However, with advances in neurobiology and neuroscience, researchers are demonstrating that this position is wrong as they move closer to a lasting understanding of the biology and psychology of emotion. In Affective Neuroscience, Jaak Panksepp provides the most up-to-date information about the brain-operating systems that organize the fundamental emotional tendencies of all mammals. Presenting complex material in a readable manner, the book offers a comprehensive summary of the fundamental neural sources of human and animal feelings, as well as a conceptual framework for studying emotional systems of the brain. Panksepp approaches emotions from the perspective of basic emotion theory but does not fail to address the complex issues raised by constructionist approaches. These issues include relations to human consciousness and the psychiatric implications of this knowledge. The book includes chapters on sleep and arousal, pleasure and fear systems, the sources of rage and anger, and the neural control of sexuality, as well as the more subtle emotions related to maternal care, social loss, and playfulness. Representing a synthetic integration of vast amounts of neurobehavioral knowledge, including relevant neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and neurochemistry, this book will be one of the most important contributions to understanding the biology of emotions since Darwins The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

Emotions are the gift nature gave us to help us connect with others. Emotions do not come from out of nowhere. Rather, they are constantly generated, usually by stimuli in our interpersonal world. They bond us to others, guide us in navigating our social interactions, and help us care for each other. Paraphrasing Shakespeare, “Our relationships are such stuff as emotions are made of”. Emotions express our needs and desires. When problems happen in our relationships, emotions arise to help us fixing those problems. However, when emotions can become dysregulated, pathology begins. Almost all forms of psychopathology are associated with dysregulated emotions or dysregulatory mechanisms. These dysregulated emotions can become regulated when the therapist helps clients express, face and regulate their emotions, and channel them into healthy actions. This research topic gathers contributions from affective neuroscientists and psychotherapists to illustrate how our emotions become dysregulated in life and can become regulated through psychotherapy.

For many years psychotherapy and neuroscience have been estranged, existing on opposite ends of the spectrum concerned with the investigation of the mind. However, in recent years, these two opposing schools of thought have found their paths converging so that now a mutually rewarding relationship is taking its first steps towards greater co-operation and understanding. The UKCP conference was one such step. Leading experts in affective neuroscience and psychotherapy attended and gave lectures that integrated material and theories from a number of fields on diverse subjects such as infant development and the relationship between emotion and consciousness. These talks highlighted the benefit of greater contact between these fields, with practical examples as well as theoretical. This innovative collection is one of the first to emphasise and demonstrate the value of greater unity and is an essential introduction for all to this burgeoning area of research.

Psychotherapy Meets Emotional Neuroscience: The Two Minds of Cognition and Feeling introduces new insights from the neurosciences into the nature of our emotions and feelings, and argues for a more empathetic approach to psychotherapy as a result. Respectful of Freud the neurologist and explorer of the mind, the book seeks to contextualise psychoanalytic theory with recent discoveries in how emotions are generated in the brain, as well as those around memory, to clarify key psychological processes such as projection and transference. It includes sketches of a number of influential analysts whose emphasis has been on a close, affective relationship with their patients--including Ferenczi, Kohut and Winnicott--and explains why, in the light of recent research, empathy is necessary for any effective psychotherapeutic relationship. There are also chapters on the use of drugs to complement psychotherapy, and how the free energy principle can explain brain functioning. In an era when neuroscientific research has provided far-reaching discoveries into how our brains work, this clear-sighted, accessible overview will offer psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, whether practicing or training, or indeed non-professionals seeking therapy for personal reasons, a way of incorporating new knowledge into their understanding of their patients and themselves.

How the brain's architecture is related to the problems, passions, and aspirations of human beings. In contrast to this view, recent theoretical advances in brain imaging have revealed that the brain is an organ continually built and re-built by one's experience. We are now beginning to learn that many forms of psychotherapy, developed in the absence of any scientific understanding of the brain, are supported by neuroscientific findings. In fact, it could be argued that to be an effective psychotherapist these days it is essential to have some basic understanding of neuroscience. Louis Cozolino's The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy, Second Edition is the perfect place to start. In a beautifully written and accessible synthesis, Cozolino illustrates how the brain's architecture is related to the problems, passions, and aspirations of human beings. As the book so elegantly argues, all forms of psychotherapy--from psychoanalysis to behavioral interventions--are successful to the extent to which they enhance change in relevant neural circuits. Beginning with an overview of the intersecting fields of neuroscience and psychotherapy, this book delves into the brain's inner workings, from basic neuronal building blocks to complex systems of memory, language, and the organization of experience. It continues by explaining the development and organization of the healthy brain and the unhealthy brain. Common problems such as anxiety, trauma, and codependency are discussed from a scientific and clinical perspective. Throughout the book, the science behind the brain's working is applied to day-to-day experience and clinical practice. Written for psychotherapists and others interested in the relationship between brain and behavior, this book encourages us to consider the brain when attempting to understand human development, mental illness, and psychological health. Fully and thoroughly updated with the many neuroscientific developments that have happened in the eight years since the publication of the first edition, this revision to the bestselling book belongs on the shelf of all practitioners.

The latest work from a pioneer in the study of the development of the self. Focusing on the hottest topics in psychotherapy—attachment, developmental neuroscience, trauma, the developing brain—this book provides a window into the ideas of one of the best-known writers on these topics. Following Allan Schore’s very successful books on affect regulation and dysregulation, also published by Norton, this is the third volume of the trilogy. It offers a representative collection of essential expansions and elaborations of regulation theory, all written since 2005. As in the first two volumes of this series, each chapter represents a further development of the theory at a particular point in time, presented in chronological order. Some of the earlier chapters have been re-edited: those more recent contain a good deal of new material that has not been previously published. The first part of the book, Affect Regulation Therapy and Clinical Neuropsychoanalysis, contains chapters on the art of the craft, offering interpersonal neurobiological models of the change mechanism in the treatment of all patients, but especially in patients with a history of early relational trauma. These chapters contain contributions on “modern attachment theory” and its focus on the essential nonverbal, unconscious affective mechanisms that lie beneath the words of the patient and therapist; on clinical neuropsychoanalytic models of working with relational trauma and pathological dissociation: and on the use of affect regulation therapy (ART) in the emotionally stressful, heightened affective moments of clinical enactments. The chapters in the second part of the book on Developmental Affective Neuroscience and Developmental Neuropsychiatry address the science that underlies regulation theory’s clinical models of development and psychopathogenesis. Although most mental health practitioners are actively involved in child, adolescent, and adult psychotherapeutic treatment, a major theme of the latter chapters is that the field now needs to more seriously attend to the problem of early intervention and prevention. Praise for Allan N. Schore: "Allan Schore reveals himself as a polymath, the depth and breadth of whose reading–bringing together neurobiology, developmental neurochemistry, behavioral neurology, evolutionary biology, developmental psychoanalysis, and infant psychiatry–is staggering." –British Journal of Psychiatry "Allan Schore's...work is leading to an integrated evidence-based dynamic theory of human development that will engender a rapproachement between psychiatry and neural sciences."–American Journal of Psychiatry "One cannot over-emphasize the significance of Schore's monumental creative labor...Oliver Sacks' work has made a great deal of difference to neurology, but Schore's is perhaps even more revolutionary and pivotal...His labors are Darwinian in scope and import."–Contemporary Psychoanalysis "Schore's model explicates in exemplary detail the precise mechanisms in which the infant brain might internalize and structuralize the affect-regulating functions of the mother, in circumscribed neural tissues, at specifiable points in it epigenetic history." –Journal of the American Psychoanalytic "Allan Schore has become a heroic figure among many psychotherapists for his massive reviews of neuroscience that center on the patient-therapist relationship." –Daniel Goleman, author of Social Intelligence