Understanding and Treatment of Patients with Persistent Somatic Complaints through the Lens of Contemporary Attachment Theory

Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Leuven (Belgium) and Reader at the Research Department of Clinical, Educational, and Health Psychology, University College London (UK). He is also a Visiting Professor at the Yale Child Study Centre in New Haven, CT, USA. His main research interests are disorders from the affective spectrum (i.e., depression and stress- and pain-related disorders), and personality disorders. In both areas he is involved in basic research and in interventional research. His basic research focuses on the roles of personality, attachment, and social cognition or mentalizing, that is, the capacity to understand oneself and others in terms of mental states, in these disorders from a developmental psychopathology perspective. Dr Luyten's research is fundamentally translational, as he is interested in translating knowledge concerning the mechanisms involved in the causation of psychopathology to the development of new interventions, the evaluation of their (cost)-effectiveness, and their dissemination to and implementation in routine clinical care. Dr Luyten is also Director of the PhD in Psychoanalysis Programme at University College London, UK. His most recent book, co-edited with Linda C. Mayes, Peter Fonagy, Mary Target and Sidney Blatt, Handbook of Psychodynamic Approaches (Guilford Press, 2015) received the 2015 Goethe Award for Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Scholarship. E-mail: