The future of EMDR

In less than 20 years, EMDR achieved international acceptance as an empirically supported treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder. In achieving this recognition, EMDR has raised fundamental questions, both about the essential mechanisms of action of existing treatments and what the foundational principles should be for future approaches to psychotherapy. Can EMDR best be explained as a variant on the exposure-extinction model of imaginal exposure? Will EMDR turn out to be an equally or more effective treatment for other anxiety disorders, for depressive disorders and for personality disorders, than other methods such as Cognitive Behavioural and Interpersonal Therapy? Is the Adaptive Information Processing model essential to the current use and the future of EMDR or is it merely an unproven and extraneous model? How will EMDR evolve over the next 20 years? For what conditions will it turn out to be most successful? How will the emergence of new technologies impact the delivery of psychotherapy in general and of EMDR? A glimpse of what lies ahead.

Conference

English

Andrew Leeds

Leeds, A. (2010, June). The future of EMDR. Keynote presented at the 11th EMDR Europe Association Conference, Hamburg, Germany