1st Edition

The Divided Therapist Hemispheric Difference and Contemporary Psychotherapy

Edited By Rod Tweedy Copyright 2021
    300 Pages
    by Routledge

    300 Pages
    by Routledge

    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.

    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

    Biography

    Rod Tweedy, PhD, is the author of The God of the Left Hemisphere: Blake, Bolte Taylor and the Myth of Creation (Routledge, 2013), a study of William Blake’s works in the light of contemporary neuroscience, and the editor of The Political Self: Understanding the Social Context for Mental Illness (Routledge, 2017). He is also an active supporter of Veterans for Peace UK and the user-led mental health organisation, Mental Fight Club.

    "A magnificent achievement." – Professor Jeremy Holmes, psychiatrist and author of Exploring in Security: Towards an Attachment-Informed Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and The Search for the Secure Base: Attachment Theory and Psychotherapy

    "Fascinating – both lucid and intriguing." – Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst and author of Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst and Attention Seeking

    "Wonderful – a really important book revealing the missing key to understanding psychopathology and psychotherapy." – Dr Phil Mollon, psychoanalyst and author of Shame and Jealousy: The Hidden Turmoils; Psychoanalytic Energy Psychotherapy; and The Fragile Self: The Structure of Narcissistic Disturbance

    "This book explores and explicates insights that are fundamentally important to the practice of therapy today. Really fascinating." – Robert Snell, analytic psychotherapist and author of Uncertainties, Mysteries, Doubts: Romanticism and the Analytic Attitude