Main description:

This important new book explores the nature of the divided brain and its relevance for contemporary psychotherapy. Citing the latest neuroscientific research, it shows how the relationship between the two hemispheres of the brain is central to our mental health, and examines both the practical and theoretical implications for therapy.

Disconnections, dissociations, and imbalances between our two hemispheres underlie many of our most prevalent forms of mental distress and disturbance. These include issues of addiction, autism, schizophrenia, depression, anorexia, relational trauma, borderline and personality disorders, psychopathy, anxiety, derealisation and devitalisation, and alexithymia. A contemporary understanding of the nature of the divided brain is therefore of importance in engaging with and treating these disturbances.

Featuring contributions from some of the key authors in the field, The Divided Therapist suggests that hemispheric integration lies at the heart of the therapeutic process itself, and that a better understanding of the precise mechanisms that underlie and enable this integration will help to transform the practice of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in the twenty-first century. The book will be essential reading for any therapeutic practitioner interested in how the architecture of the brain informs and effects their client's issues and challenges.

Contents:

Introduction

Rod Tweedy

CHAPTER ONE

The Right Brain Is Dominant in Psychotherapy

Allan N. Schore

CHAPTER TWO

Ways of Attending: How our Divided Brain Constructs the World

Iain McGilchrist

CHAPTER THREE

Social and Emotional Laterality

Louis Cozolino

CHAPTER FOUR

Distinct But Linked: Wellbeing and the Multimodal Mind

Alexander Welch Siegel and Daniel J. Siegel

CHAPTER FIVE

Systems-Centered Group Psychotherapy: Developing a Group Mind that Supports Right Brain Function and Right-Left-Right Hemispheric Integration

Susan P. Gantt and Bonnie Badenoch

CHAPTER SIX

Going Beyond Sucking Stones: Connection and Emergent Meaning in Life and in Therapy

Barbara Dowds

CHAPTER SEVEN

A right-brain dissociative model for right-brain disorders: Dissociation vs repression in borderline and other severe psychopathologies of early traumatic origin.

Clara Mucci

CHAPTER EIGHT

Growing, Living and Being Rightly

Darcia Narvaez

CHAPTER NINE

The Therapeutic Purpose of Right Hemispheric Language

Russell Meares

CHAPTER TEN

The formation of the two types of contexts by brain hemispheres as a basis for the new approach to the mechanisms of psychotherapy

Vadim S. Rotenberg