Books
A short reading list, with one sentence on what each book is for.
Gregory Bateson · University of Chicago Press · 1972
The double bind, and the intellectual source of most systemic thinking.
Salvador Minuchin · Routledge · 1974
Structural family therapy, with transcripts that still teach better than most training films.
Murray Bowen · Jason Aronson · 1978
Differentiation of self and the multigenerational transmission process.
Judith L. Herman · Basic Books · 1992
Links private and political violence, and sets out the three stages of recovery.
Francine Shapiro · Guilford Press · 1995
EMDR from its originator. Included because the evidence base is now hard to ignore.
Peter A. Levine · North Atlantic Books · 1997
Somatic Experiencing, and the argument that trauma is held in the body's incomplete responses.
Bessel van der Kolk · Penguin · 2014
The book clients most often arrive holding. Contested in places and worth knowing well for that reason.
Eric R. Kandel, James H. Schwartz · McGraw Hill · 1981
The standard textbook of neuroscience since 1981, and the reference behind most of what the other books here take for granted.
Allan N. Schore · Routledge · 1994
Attachment and right-hemisphere development brought together. Dense, and foundational.
Antonio Damasio · Vintage · 1994
The somatic marker hypothesis. Emotion as necessary to reason rather than opposed to it.