The Healing Power of Emotion: Affective Neuroscience, Development & Clinical Practice

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.

Diana Fosha, PhD, is the developer of AEDP®, a healing-based, radically relational, transformation-oriented experiential psychotherapy, and Founder and Director of the AEDP® Institute. She is the editor of Undoing Aloneness and the Transformation of Suffering into Flourishing: AEDP 2.0 (APA, 2021); co-editor with Natasha Prenn of Supervision Essentials for Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (APA, 2016); co-editor with Dan Siegel and Marion Solomon of The Healing Power of Emotion: Affective Neuroscience, Development & Clinical Practice (Norton, 2009); and author of The Transforming Power of Affect: A Model for Accelerated Change (Basic Books, 2000). Based in New York City, where she lives and practices, Fosha has been on the faculties of the Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology of NYU and St. Luke’s/Roosevelt Medical Centers (now Mount Sinai) in NYC, and of the doctoral programs in Clinical Psychology at the Derner Institute for Advanced Psychological Studies at Adelphi University and at The City University of New York.

Daniel J. Siegel, MD, is the Cofounder of Mind Your Brain, the Founder and Director of Education of the Mindsight Institute, Founding Co-Director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, and an international conference speaker. He is a NYTimes-bestselling author of books like Mind, The Mindful Therapist 2nd Edition, The Mindful Brain, Aware, and The Developing Mind, and Founding Editor of the Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB), with over 1.4 million books sold. Learn more about the IPNB Series at wwnorton.com/ipnbseries.

Marion Solomon, PhD, is a lecturer at the David Geffen School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry at UCLA. She is co-editor with Dan Siegel of several books in the IPNB Series, including Healing Trauma and How People Change.