The enigmatic method: Is EMDR a psychotherapeutic breakthrough, pseudoscience, or a little bit of both?

THE ORIGIN STORY OF EMDR, a popular but contentious form of psychotherapy most often used to treat trauma, goes something like this: One afternoon in 1987, Francine Shapiro, a doctoral student in clinical psychology, was walking along the Vasona Reservoir in Los Gatos, California, a suburb of San Jose. "It was spring," she later wrote. "Ducks were paddling by, and bright blankets full of mothers and babies were laid out on wide green lawns." Shapiro had recently recovered from breast cancer and left behind a potential career as a literary scholar to explore the connection between the mind and the body. "As I walked along," she continued, "an odd thing happened. I had been thinking about something disturbing; I don't even remember what it was, just one of those nagging negative thoughts that the mind keeps chewing over (without digesting) until we forcibly stop it. The odd thing was that my nagging thought had disappeared. On its own." She kept walking, and she observed that when a negative thought came to mind, her eyes moved diagonally, very quickly. When she returned to the thought, it had lost its emotional charge. (Excerpt)

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Merg Bernhard
Jules Julian

Bernhard, M., & Julien, J. (2023). The enigmatic method: Is EMDR a psychotherapeutic breakthrough, pseudoscience, or a little bit of both? Virginia Quarterly Review, 99(1), 172-184