The Healing Power of Emotion
An edited clinical volume on emotion, affective neuroscience and practice.
The emotion-based transformational process, in the context of dyadic safety and recognition, has within it the answer to the energy crisis that psychopathology creates.
Contributors from affective neuroscience, developmental research, and clinical practice write chapters around a single claim: emotion, worked with inside a safe relationship, is what moves therapy. The editors gather figures whose ideas already shape psychodynamic thinking. Jaak Panksepp maps the primary emotional systems that drive behaviour; Stephen Porges links autonomic state and cues of safety to social engagement; Allan Schore addresses right-brain affect regulation; Colwyn Trevarthen and Ed Tronick track the infant dyad; Pat Ogden brings the body into the session; Susan Johnson works with emotion in couples.
Two arguments carry weight in the consulting room. First, self-regulation is built between people, so the therapeutic relationship is where regulation is repaired. Second, positive and transformational affect deserve as much clinical attention as painful or dysregulated states. Diana Fosha's chapters develop this, treating moments of vitality, truth, and relief as material to be recognised and deepened rather than passed over.
About the authors
Diana Fosha
Diana Fosha is an American clinical psychologist and the developer of Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), a healing-oriented experiential model. She founded the AEDP Institute and serves as its director. Her 2000 book The Transforming Power of Affect set out the approach, and she co-edited The Healing Power of Emotion (2009). Her work centres on transformational affect, attachment, and the positive dyadic regulation of emotion. She led the multi-author AEDP 2.0 volume, Undoing Aloneness and the Transformation of Suffering into Flourishing (2021).
Daniel Siegel
Daniel J. Siegel is an American physician and clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine. Trained in pediatrics and in child, adolescent, and adult psychiatry, he founded the approach he calls interpersonal neurobiology and serves as director of education at the Mindsight Institute. He is founding editor of the Norton Professional Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology and the author of many books, among them The Developing Mind, Mindsight, Brainstorm, and Aware. He was a founding co-director of UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center.
Marion Solomon
Marion F. Solomon is an American psychotherapist whose work centers on couples therapy, attachment, and the treatment of trauma. She co-founded the Lifespan Learning Institute in Los Angeles and served as senior faculty in UCLA's Extension Division and as a professor at the American Behavioral Studies Institute. She wrote or co-authored several books, among them Narcissism and Intimacy, Lean on Me, and Short Term Therapy for Long Term Change, and co-edited Healing Trauma with Daniel J. Siegel.
Details
- 2009
- W. W. Norton
- W. W. Norton
- 368
- 9780393705485