Trauma Psychiatry, Somatic Neuroscience
Bessel van der Kolk
Boston University School of Medicine; Trauma Research Foundation · 1943–
Key work
The Body Keeps the Score (2014)
What they contributed
Van der Kolk's research documented that traumatic experience is encoded in the body — in the autonomic nervous system, the limbic system, and muscular patterns — rather than primarily in narrative memory. His work established that effective trauma treatment must engage the body, not only the cognitive mind, and that standard talk therapy is insufficient for processing somatic trauma encoding.
Why it matters here
The claim that runs through all somatic-oriented writing here — that the body holds what the mind has narrativized differently — rests on van der Kolk's research. His work informs every article on why insight alone does not produce behavioral change.
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