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Neuroscience of Enduring Change: Implications for Psychotherapy, Richard Lane and Lynn Nadel (eds.) (2020)

What Is Memory That It Can Be Changed? Lynne Nadel Multiple trace theory (MTT) makes two important claims. (1) Whenever the hippocampus is involved in the retrieval of episodic memories. (2) When a memory is reactivated, it becomes labile and must be reconsolidated, and within this window, there is a possibility that it can be changed. This raises two important questions. First, what is the function of consolidation? Consolidation allows us to integrate episodic memories with semantic memories or schemas. Put different, memory consolidation integrates “new experiences into established knowledge networks.” A major goal of psychotherapy is “to create momentary experiences that will lead to lasting changes in semantic memories or schemas.” Second, what is the advantage of having a malleable memory system? The answer is that as time passes we gather new information, and so it is adaptive to be able to update our memories to reflect this new information so that we in turn act accordingly. I
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My Psychotherapeutic Framework

Emotional Health Humans have two basic psychological needs. Need #1: Connection. We all need meaningful and supportive relationships, relationships in which we can both love and to be loved. Need #2: Self-Realization. We also need to develop our authentic self, to discover and express our unique personality and potential. When these two needs are met, we’re likely to feel good and experience emotional health. Emotional Problems However, when these needs are not met, our emotional health suffers. There are two main factors that can prevent our needs from being met: deficient ego functions and maladaptive schemas. Impediment #1: Deficient Ego Functions Ego functions are the skills we use to manage both our inner life and our relationship to others. The Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual categorizes ego functions into four sets of capacities: (1) cognitive and affective processes include cognitive intelligence, emotional intelligence, and the ability to mentalize; (2) identity and relationsh
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Memory Reconsolidation

Lane, R. D., Ryan, L., Nadel, L., & Greenberg, L. (2015). Memory reconsolidation, emotional arousal, and the process of change in psychotherapy: New insights from brain science. Behavioral and brain sciences, 38, e1. Catharsis Is Not Enough Freud and Breuer argued that an individual developed psychological symptoms when they experienced a traumatic event but did not express their feelings. The key to healing, they hypothesized, was emotional abreaction or catharsis. “Research shows that emotional catharsis alone (e.g., beating a pillow) does not attenuate or dissipate affect but rather leads to a heightening of it (Bushman 2002).” Therapeutic Change Requires a Corrective Emotional Experience This concept was first introduced by Franz Alexander and Thomas French. Change, they argued, requires (1) “activating old memories and their associated emotions” and (2) “introducing new emotional experiences in therapy enabling new emotional elements to be incorporated into that memory trace v
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Emotions Index

LeDoux, Joseph The Emotional Brain (1996) Rethinking the Emotional Brain (2014) Misc. Ekman, Paul Plutchik, Robert Panksepp, Jaak A Short-Cut to Understanding Affect Neuroscience, Lucy Bevin (2022) Affective Neuroscience in Psychotherapy, Francis Stevens (2021) Tomkins, Silvan Tompkins, Silvan The Affect Theory of Silvan Tompkins, E. Virginia Demos (2019)
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Development Index

  Beebe and Lachmann The Origins of Attachment (2014) Demos, Virginia Affect and the  Early Organization of the Self, Demos (1988) Early Organization of the Psyche, Demos (1992)
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Unlocking the Emotional Brain— Bruce Eker, Robin Ticic, Laurel Hulley (2024)

Introduction Transformational change is possible. Therapists want to bring about transformational change, dispelling deeply entrenched emotional learnings, i.e., learnings “formed in the presence of intense emotion, such as core beliefs and constructs formed in childhood.” However, as late as the 1990s, neuroscientists believed that emotional learnings “indelible, unerasable, for the lifetime of the individual.” But then some neuroscientists discovered memory reconsolidation, a type of neuroplasticity that allows emotional learnings to be “not merely overridden by actually nullified and deleted by new learning.” This new learning, they found, “creates new neural circuits, but it is only when new learning also unwires old learning that transformational change occurs.” This book outlines the emotional coherence framework for psychotherapy, which provides a unifying account of (a) emotional learning and memory, (b) the unlearning and deletion of emotional implicit knowledge through memory
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Misc. Index

Coherence Therapy Unlocking the Emotional Brain— Bruce Eker, Robin Ticic, Laurel Hulley (2024) Emotion-Focused Therapies Emotionally-Focused Therapy, Sue Johnson Emotion-Focused Therapy, Leslie Greenberg (2015) Changing Emotion with Emotion, Leslie Greenberg (2021) Gabbard and Westen Neuroscience and Psychoanalysis Rethinking Therapeutic Action Misc. Book, Howard — How to Practice Brief Psychodynamic Psychotherapy (1998) Shedler, Jonathan The Efficacy of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy (2010) The Tyranny of Time: How Long Does Effective Therapy Really Take? (2020)
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