Re-Visioning Psychiatry


Book Description

Revisioning Psychiatry brings together new perspectives on the causes and treatment of mental health problems. The contributors emphasize the importance of understanding experience and explore how the brain, the person, and the social world interact to give rise to mental health problems as well as resilience and recovery.




Phenomenology, Neuroscience and Clinical Practice


Book Description

This book offers fundamental insights into three main fields of education and expertise: phenomenology, neuroscience, and clinical practice. The richness and pluralism of the contributions aim to overcome the reductionist and dualistic approach to mental health and shed new light on clinical practice. Designed as both an education tool for mental health professionals, and a theoretical investigation for philosophers on the use of phenomenology in clinical practice, this book highlights the need for a new direction on mental health, and more general, on human wellbeing. This volume aims to fill the gap between philosophers and mental health professionals on an educational level, in a space unique in its open and transdisciplinary approach. It appeals to students and researchers but also very much to professionals and clinicians in the field.




The Healing Power of Emotion: Affective Neuroscience, Development & Clinical Practice (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology)


Book Description

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.




Trauma Therapy and Clinical Practice: Considerations of Neuroscience, Gestalt and the Body, 2nd Edition


Book Description

“This book, now in its second edition, has become a classic in clinical studies of trauma. Its informed content, deeply humane style, numerous clinical examples, flowing narrative and ethical clarity make it an essential contribution to all contemporary clinicians and psychotherapists-in-training of any approach.” Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb, Director of the Italian Gestalt Therapy Institute, Italy “This book calls us to think critically about the language we use; to regularly examine our cherished theories and ways of working; and to embrace multiple perspectives... I would recommend it to all therapists, wherever they are in their careers.” Dr Sue Wright, Integrative and Sensorimotor Psychotherapist, UK Working with traumatised clients can present challenges and complexities for therapists as they navigate what are often highly specific, deep-rooted issues. Trauma Therapy and Clinical Practice has been fully updated to reflect the changes that have impacted therapy research over the past decade and represents a major advancement in how trauma is perceived. While staying true to her premise of trauma as an embodied experience and retaining the book’s popular three-part structure, in this new edition trauma is repositioned as a social justice issue and reconsiders the emphasis on neuroscience, taking trauma theory further into a relational view. This new edition: • Thoroughly explores the role of fear, helplessness, dissociation and shame • Offers valuable insights into restoring continuity of self and of time • Contains updated, diverse references and intersectional analyses • Uses refreshed pedagogy to help deepen learning • Critically discusses concepts such as mindfulness in relation to trauma therapy. Written in her trademark accessible and personal writing style, Miriam Taylor examines the application of both neuroscience and Gestalt theory in recovery, presenting a considered theoretical basis for working with highly traumatised people. The new edition of Trauma Therapy and Clinical Practice is at the cutting edge of contemporary trauma thinking and is essential reading for trainees and practitioners in counselling and therapy. Miriam Taylor is a semi-retired Gestalt psychotherapist, supervisor and international trainer. With over 30 years’ experience of working with trauma, her approach is embodied and relational in the widest possible sense. She is the author of Deepening Trauma Practice and is on the Leadership Team of Relational Change, UK.




Neurophenomenology and Its Applications to Psychology


Book Description

This book explores the meaning and import of neurophenomenology and the philosophy of enactive or embodied cognition for psychology. It introduces the psychologist to an experiential, non-reductive, holistic, theoretical, and practical framework that integrates the approaches of natural and human science to consciousness. In integrating phenomenology with cognitive science, neurophenomenology provides a bridge between the natural and human sciences that opens an interdisciplinary dialogue on the nature of awareness, the ontological primacy of experience, the perception of the observer, and the mind-brain relationship, which will shape the future of psychological theory, research, and practice.​​




Towards a New Philosophy of Mental Health


Book Description

This volume represents the results of the Sixteenth International Conference for Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology, entitled “Neuroscience, Logic and Mental Development”. This edited collection brings together selected plenary and keynote papers from the conference, and represents a major contribution to an interdisciplinary dialogue in mental health through the use of new philosophical tools, emerging from neuroscience, clinical psychology, phenomenology and epistemology. The papers gathered in this volume are divided into four parts, depending on their disciplinary paradigm. The papers included in Part I are focused on advances in neuroscience and neuroimaging as theoretical underpinnings for progress in psychiatric and psychological explanations. Special attention is paid here to the critical reappraisal of current approaches to the implementation of neuroscience in mental health. Some of these papers end with suggestions for modifications to contemporary research programs. The papers belonging to Part II contribute to the psychological understanding of mental disorders, particularly personality disorders. Parts III and IV trace the implications of phenomenology and epistemology for the improvement of an interdisciplinary pluralogue in psychiatry.




Empathy and Ethics


Book Description

The authors offer a phenomenological reflection on the problem of the interconnection between empathy and ethics; essential reading for professionals and scholars of philosophy, psychiatry, health science, psychology, and sociology.




The Vulnerability of the Human World


Book Description

This book contains the most recent papers problematizing the notions of health, vulnerability, and well-being for individuals and their environment. Organized in 5 sections the book takes into consideration the critical and phenomenological history of well-being and health, their technological manipulation, how these notions connect with the body and the specific vulnerability of the human being, and what responsible direction we can take to improve people's relation to themselves, to other living beings and their environment. In order to address the issue of the vulnerability of the human world and how to respond to its specific challenges, the contributions in this book discuss the topic from a broad range of perspectives, including anthropological, psychological, sociological, philosophical, and environmental.




Simplex Society


Book Description

This open access book provides thought-provoking anthropology grounded in comparative ethnography. The theory captures the current historical moment, the long-term trends that led us here, and the prospects for a humane future. The experience of complexity characterizing a globalized information society triggers simplexes. These unidimensional responses instrumental in bringing about a predictable effect are altering our ways of communicating and the technologies we design. In Part I, a ‘speciated’ history, injected with the anthropology of Bateson and Gluckman, describes the semantic and experiential impoverishment of the lifeworld. After going through the affects of distrust (the neolithic lifeway), of futility (industrial lifeway) and disconnection (post-knowledge), the human species today depends for its survival on installing a new lifeway, which manages to wed (eco-social) inclusion to the already difficult first pair of the French Revolution. The species needs to rehumanize. Part II illustrates the remedies currently developed: to reframe, re-sphere and re-source. What do critical street art, international football matches, presidential elections, hip-hop dissing performances, charismatic church services, intuition stimulation, and ‘pre-ceptive’ experiences of consciousness have in common? They are moments of the real. Rooted in ‘life sensing’, they are tensors organizing frameshift. As multiplex measures tackling the simplex, these tensors overcome the cultural relativism of the postmodern matrix.