While Philip Bromberg and Giovanni Liotti both made ground-breaking contributions to our understandings of dissociation and psychotherapy, they took very different routes. Bromberg was first and foremost a clinician, albeit one with unbridled passions for literature and psychoanalytic history. In contrast, The Italian psychiatrist Liotti was as much theorist as he was therapist, with a strong interest in childhood experiences and developmental pathways to psychopathology. Trained as a cognitive-behavioral therapist and renowned in his native Italy for his psychotherapy training and teaching, Liotti impressed John Bowlby – who was astonished that a cognitive-behaviorally-oriented thinker could understand attachment theory as well as he did. Liotti was one of the first to recognize the essential similarity between infant disorganized attachment and adulthood dissociation and dissociative disorders, and speculated on the pathways that led from one to the other, as well as to borderline personality disorder and psychotic disorders. He believed that attachment was essential to understanding traumatic reactions, which activated the attachment system along with its corresponding implicit memories and internal working models of relationships. In his therapeutic work, Liotti emphasized the activation of the ‘cooperative’ system in psychotherapy, which kept the attachment system at bay, along with a careful and measured activation of the attachment system when indicated. His nuanced understanding of evolutionary-based motivational systems provided a cutting-edge vision of not only the ebb-and-flow of psychotherapy, but also the triggering of abusive behavior.
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Video Lecture: Liotti in Context.
PPT Slides: Liotti Session One
Video Lecture: Liotti’s developmentally-informed attachment perspective on the genesis of dissociation-related psychological disorders.
PPT Slides: Liotti Session Two
Video Lecture: Liotti’s evolutionary-based conception of motivational systems and their role in psychotherapy and aggressive behavior.
PPT Slides: Liotti Session Three
Andrew Moskowitz, Ph.D. is director of the Forensic Psychology graduate program at George Washington University in Alexandria, Virginia, former president of the European Society for Trauma and Dissociation and a core member of the WHO ICD-11 dissociative disorders diagnoses task force. He is a renowned expert in the trauma/dissociation field, who, for the past 20 years, has used this perspective to inform our understandings of psychosis and violent behavior. As a clinical and forensic psychologist, Dr. Moskowitz has performed therapy and conducted forensic evaluations in the United States, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, in both prison and forensic mental health settings. As an academic, he has taught undergraduate and graduate psychology and medical students in the United States, New Zealand, Scotland, Denmark and Germany, and was the lead editor of both editions of the influential book Psychosis, Trauma and Dissociation (Wiley, 2008, 2019).
