What you need, and don’t need, for effective psychotherapy
Lessons from lesion neuropsychology
What you need, and don’t need, for effective psychotherapy:
Lessons from lesion neuropsychology
5 p.m. (UK time)
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This webinar will be approximately two hours long.
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How does psychotherapy work, and which brain areas does it require? Much research in this area has taken a functional imaging approach to the problem. Our group has taken a different approach, using human lesion neuropsychology. This allows us to identify which brain areas, and importantly which psychological processes, are necessary for the specific skills that underpin psychotherapy. This talk reviews two strands of this work. One strand relates to essential skills, specifically emotion regulation, and the role of particular classes of executive function in strategies known to be important for mental health. This work features group studies to establish large effects, and case studies to describe what it feels like to lose these abilities. A second strand of the talk relates to skills not needed for psychotherapy, with a focus on episodic memory, including the first ever published account of long term psychoanalytic therapy with a profoundly amnesic patient. These findings have implications for therapeutic technique, for the transference, and for which sorts of patient might be appropriate for treatment.
Bio
Professor Oliver Turnbull is a neuropsychologist (and a clinical psychologist) in Bangor University, North Wales, with an interest in emotion and its many consequences for mental life. His interests include: emotion-based learning, and the experience that we describe as ‘intuition’; the role of emotion in false beliefs, especially in neurological patients; emotion regulation, and the neuroscience of psychotherapy. He is the author of some 200 scientific articles on these topics. He is the author (with Mark Solms) of the The Brain and the Inner World, and editor (with Christian Salas and Mark Solms) of the newly published Clinical Studies in Neuropsychoanalysis Revisited. For a decade he was Editor of the journal Neuropsychoanalysis, and Secretary of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society. He is a Professor of Neuropsychology at Bangor University, where he is also Deputy Vice Chancellor.
CPD credits: 2
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