Neuroscience of Psychological Therapies
August 28, 2006

The following volumes will be available in February 2007. They are being published by Cambridge University Press. I thought some members of ISPS would be very interested. The neuroimaging scans I have personally seen (only a few) post-psychological therapy, and those of published studies, all seem to be in the direction of lowered arousal, fear and anxiety (the data is inferential at this point, but highly suggestive). As some have suggested, like Bowlby, Fonagy, & Holmes, attachment may be the biological basis of psychotherapy and secure attachments can lead to better affect regulation and capacity to represent and integrate affective/interpersonal experiences. For many psychoanalysts however, the crux is in helping the patient to have the capacity to establish secure attachments, for as we know attachment and emotional closeness can create strong feelings of anxiety and fears of abandonment (for more disturbed patients a literally kill-or-be-killed emotional atmosphere can emerge in the transference). This would involve, for PostKleinian psychoanalysts, a living through process (e.g., understanding enactments, containing & interpreting negative transferences, helping the patient to integrate pathological projective identifications, etc.) leading to a more integrated internal world and a lessening of paranoid anxieties (narcissism) and a greater capacity to tolerate depressive anxieties and guilt. For many of us, it also means that transgenerational traumas are named and understood. For Henri Rey, it is crucial that one's internal objects which are damaged (perhaps by one's dependency, hostility, etc. or by external traumas, transgenerational traumas, etc.) are symbolically repaired, so that the person can go on with her or his life.

Brian Koehler