The Healing Power of Emotion: Affective Neuroscience, Development & Clinical Practice

by Diana Fosha PhD, Daniel J. Siegel M.D., Marion F. Solomon Ph.D.

Overview

Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience to better understand emotion.

We are hardwired to connect with one another, and we connect through our emotions. Our brains, bodies, and minds are inseparable from the emotions that animate them.

Normal human development relies on the cultivation of relationships with others to form and nurture the self-regulatory circuits that enable emotion to enrich, rather than enslave, our lives. And just as emotionally traumatic events can tear apart the fabric of family and psyche, the emotions can become powerful catalysts for the transformations that are at the heart of the healing process.

In this book, the latest addition to the Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology, leading neuroscientists, developmental psychologists, therapy researchers, and clinicians illuminate how to regulate emotion in a healthy way. A variety of emotions, both positive and negative, are examined in detail, drawing on both research and clinical observations. The role of emotion in bodily regulation, dyadic connection, marital communication, play, well-being, health, creativity, and social engagement is explored. The Healing Power of Emotion offers fresh, exciting, original, and groundbreaking work from the leading figures studying and working with emotion today.

Contributors include: Jaak Panksepp, Stephen W. Porges, Colwyn Trevarthen, Ed Tronick, Allan N. Schore, Daniel J. Siegel, Diana Fosha, Pat Ogden, Marion F. Solomon, Susan Johnson, and Dan Hughes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393705485
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/16/2009
Series:	Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	349
Sales rank:	1,140,201
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Diana Fosha, PhD, is Director of the AEDP Institute in New York City.

Noted neuropsychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel, MD, is clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine, and executive director of the Mindsight Institute in LA. He is founding editor of the Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology.

Marion Solomon, PhD, is a lecturer at the David Geffen School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry at UCLA. She is co-editor with Dan Siegel of several books in the IPNB Series, including Healing Trauma and How People Change.

Editorial Reviews

"A masterful panoramic view of emotion. This is an important and superbly done book, especially strong in balancing the clinical with the scientific."

Daniel N. Stern

"Imagine that some of most brilliant, neuroscientific contributors to our understanding of emotion and brain development, teamed up with some of the most knowledgeable, creative psychotherapists alive, and really listened to, and learned to understand each other’s work. The result is this essential, palpably exciting, at times profound volume, which shows how to use brain-based insights, and inevitable emotions themselves, to foster mental healing."

Norman Doidge

"It is gratifying to see this important new volume direct a long-overdue spotlight on the essential element of emotional change in psychotherapy. This volume provides information on neurophysiology, phenomenology, and interactive dynamics that can benefit clinicians of all orientations."

Francine Shapiro

"This book—the fruit of a dialogue among eminent neuroscientists, clinicians, attachment researchers, and body workers—achieves a level of integration among these various disciplines that has not been seen before. A magisterial achievement!"

Bessel van der Kolk