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A member of the Independent Group within the British Psychoanalytical Society, Phil Mollon is also a clinical psychologist and trained in psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic. He works primarily within the NHS. With several books published, his interests have included Kohut and Self Psychology, trauma and traumatic memory, dissociative states of mind, shame, and disturbances in the experience of self. He is on the Advisory Board of the New York Institute for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology. In addition, Mollon is an advanced practitioner of meridian energy therapies, an accredited practitioner of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and a licensed trainer of Emotrance™ (an energy therapy). His latest book serves as an introduction to the psychoanalytic field of the methods of treatment in energy psychology and the treatment for trauma, EMDR, all of which have developed over the last 25 years. With a range of case illustrations, mostly brief and from NHS clinics, the book shows how these treatment methods allow the rapid release and processing of painful emotions and traumatic memories. Mollon compares the pioneers of these methods with the pioneers of psychoanalysis. Indeed the book shows how they are compatible with many of the original insights of Freudian psychoanalysis. Trauma, he writes, ‘hijacks the body’ and ‘acts as if it were a wish’ (p. 36), and he explains why he thinks attention should be paid to the way emotion and trauma are experienced within the patient. Discussing Freud's thoughts on how internal conflict is akin to traumatic experience and how remembering is replaced by repeating, he suggests the focused targeting and processing of specific emotions could be usefully combined with, and enhance, the lengthy, unstructured work of ‘psychoanalytic enquiry’ (p. xv).
EMDR was originally developed by clinical psychologist Francine Shapiro. Mollon describes how Shapiro discovered that making rapid side-to-side eye movements was an effective