EMDR and energy therapies: psychoanalytic perspectives

In this pioneering work, Phil Mollon explores how the insights of EMDR, energy psychology and psychoanalysis can be combined to inform and enrich one another and enable healing at a much deeper level. Drawing out how Freud's psychoanalysis was originally an energy psychology, Mollon points to ways in which some forms of contemporary psychoanalysis may be hampered by a current fashion for an excessive focus on transference rather than upon intrapsychic processing of emotional information.Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), along with methods from the new field of energy psychology, enable the rapid processing and release of traumatic memories and painful emotion. Whilst both psychoanalytic and cognitive therapies are able to elicit the structures of thought and feeling that trap the individual in repetitive maladaptive behaviours, neither are very good at actually processing and transforming the troubling emotions and mental pain. Thus, traditional talking therapies may provide some insight or constructive ways of thinking, but do not alter the core patterns of dysfunctional emotional information.Mollon outlines a bedrock resistance to psychic change - disintegration anxiety - explaining how this deepest of all terrors may be addressed in therapy. An overall model of the psychosomatic system is presented, detailing the interaction and layering between the energy system, conscious and unconscious cognition and emotion, neurobiology, and physiology. Relevant research is summarized and many clinical examples are provided in the book.