Minding Emotions: Cultivating Mentalization in Psychotherapy

“In this excellent book, Jurist expertly guides the reader through an in-depth exploration and deconstruction of what it means to ‘work with emotions’ in psychotherapy. Drawing on a wide range of ideas from neuroscience, cognitive psychology and psychoanalysis, Jurist offers an impressive overview grounded in clear clinical and nonclinical examples. This book will be an asset to both qualified and training psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, psychologists, and psychiatrists. Highly recommended.”–Alessandra Lemma, DClinPsych, Visiting Professor, Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London, United Kingdom

“Do we know what we feel? ‘Aporetic emotions’ inhabit us as unknown, obscure, and often confusing states of mind. Jurist knows that these emotions represent a challenge for any human being and even more for every clinician. With competence, wisdom, and empathy, he tells us how to make them more intelligible. By interweaving his ideas and research findings with autobiographical memoirs of renowned people, Jurist makes us understand what it means to identify, modulate, and express emotions–to mentalize them. This is a book for anyone who wants to build strong therapeutic alliances and be a better clinician, regardless of theoretical orientation.”–Vittorio Lingiardi, MD, Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

“This beautifully written, integrated account reflects two decades of Jurist’s thinking about one of the deepest puzzles of psychological treatment–the patient’s experience of his or her own emotion and the way this interfaces with the forces and circumstances of a lived life. Jurist brings clarity to the murky area of the phenomenology of affect. He explains the value of and identifies a coherent approach to the therapeutic focus on emotion. This extraordinary work empowers both therapist and patient to harness the power of affect to drive change in thought and behavior. An extremely significant and most welcome contribution to postmodality psychotherapy.”–Peter Fonagy, OBE, FMedSci, FBA, PhD, Professor of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Developmental Science and Head, Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, United Kingdom

“Minding Emotions is not only a lucid, highly intelligent, and compassionate explication of what it means to identify and mentalize emotions in clinical practice, it is that rare work that deftly integrates research from neurobiology and empirical psychology with philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, case histories, and memoir. Rather than isolating science from the therapeutic dyad and the art of narrative, Jurist makes an astute argument for their unification in this important book.”–Siri Hustvedt, PhD, novelist, essayist, and Lecturer in Psychiatry, Weill Cornell College

“A veritable tour de force. Jurist takes the reader on a journey that elucidates the regulation, expression, and mentalization of emotional states. His scope is impressively comprehensive, and he embodies the professor that we all wish we’d had–one who fascinates while educating. I highly recommend this volume to both experienced therapists and students in the mental health professions.”–Glen O. Gabbard, MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Baylor College of Medicine