Psychotherapy Meets Emotional Neuroscience

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.