The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy
What changes in the brain when therapy works, written for clinicians rather than researchers.
The quality and nature of our interpersonal relationships become encoded within the neural infrastructure of our brains.
Louis Cozolino brings affective and social neuroscience to bear on the work of therapy, building the book around the premise that the brain is a social organ, formed and reformed through relationship across the lifespan. He moves through neural development, the memory systems that store experience, affect regulation, the stress response, and the place of language and narrative in binding these together, translating laboratory findings into terms a clinician can hold in mind while sitting with a patient.
For the psychodynamic reader, the value lies in how it anchors familiar clinical ideas in the body. Cozolino gives a neurobiological account of why the relationship itself carries the treatment: how safety and attunement support integration across networks that stress and trauma have kept apart, how early relational patterns persist in implicit memory and return in the consulting room, and how the joint making of a coherent story reorganizes affect. Containment and attachment gain a physiological correlate without being reduced to it.
The third edition, revised and enlarged, appeared in 2017.
About the author
Louis Cozolino
Louis Cozolino is an American clinical psychologist and Professor of Psychology at Pepperdine University's Graduate School of Education and Psychology in Los Angeles, where he has taught since 1986. He holds a PhD in clinical psychology from UCLA and a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard. His work connects neuroscience with psychotherapy, attachment and human relationships, and he is the author of The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy. Alongside teaching, he maintains a clinical and consulting practice in Los Angeles.
Details
- 2002
- English
- W. W. Norton
- W. W. Norton, 3rd edition, 2017
- 608
- 9780393712643