Could Neuroscience, and more specifically Interpersonal Neurobiology, clarify the unique ways in which group processes interact with the brain and enhance its development, as well as its reparative processes? This book brings together the work of twelve contemporary group therapists who explore this direction, applying the principles of Interpersonal Neurobiology to a variety of approaches to group psychotherapy. The fact that Interpersonal Neurobiology focuses on how human beings, through their interactions, shape each other's brains throughout their lives, makes it a very fertile approach for all of us who coordinate therapeutic groups. The group is a unique environment that has the ability to trigger, enhance, contain, and provide resonance to a wide range of human experiences, thus creating the necessary conditions for changing the neural pathways of the brain and the resulting behaviors.
This innovative collective volume contributes in a very creative way to the effort to connect the rich experience in group psychotherapy with the latest developments in neuroscience. Drawing from their therapeutic work with children, adults, and couples, the authors use the interdisciplinary perspective of interpersonal neurobiology to understand the conscious and unconscious psychoneurobiological mechanisms involved in the processes of manifest and especially latent change sought by group psychotherapy. This book also contributes to understanding how effective coordination of a group focused on emotion can create an environment in which the development and optimization of the brain circuits of the "social-emotional" right hemisphere, which constitutes the biological substrate of the human unconscious mind, thrive. It also constitutes a theoretical source for the development of group psychotherapy models that have empirical evidence and can operate at a clinical level.