The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy: Healing the Social Brain (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology)

by Louis Cozolino

In reviewing these different psychotherapeutic modalities, a number of principles emerge that unify the various therapeutic schools. The first is that psychotherapy values openness, honesty, and trust. Each form of psychotherapy creates an individualized experience designed to examine conscious and unconscious beliefs and assumptions, expand awareness and reality testing, and encourage the confrontation of anxiety-provoking experiences. Each perspective explores behavior, emotion, sensation, and cognition in an attempt to increase awareness of previously unconscious or distorted material. The primary focus of psychotherapy appears to be the integration of affect, in all its forms, with conscious awareness, and cognition. Intellectual understanding of a psychological problem in the absence of increased integration with emotion, sensation, and behavior does not result in change.