Editorial

Excerpt: EMDR has come a long way in the 20 years since Francine Shapiro’s 1987 walk in the park. At that time, she noticed that rapid eye movements decreased the emotionality of some intrusive memories, and she intuitively recognized that this phenomenon had great clinical utility. Shapiro went on to develop a treatment approach (Shapiro, 1989) that has been taught to more than one hundred thousand clinicians worldwide and that has eliminated the distress of many millions of clients. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR; Shapiro, 2001) is a structured psychotherapy approach and was designed to facilitate the processing of distressing memories. Its efficacy in the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been widely acknowledged, and EMDR is a recommended therapy in numerous international guidelines.

Journal

English

Louise Maxfield

Maxfield, L. (2007). Editorial. Journal of EMDR Practice and Research, 1(1), 4-5. doi:10.1891/1933-3196.1.1.4