Review of Minding emotions: Cultivating mentalization in psychotherapy.

Reviews the book Minding emotions: Cultivating mentalization in psychotherapy by Elliot Jurist (2018). This book focuses on mentalization and emotions in psychotherapy, one that makes us rethink received ideas about what emotions are all about and how we come to understand them and modulate them, “modulation” being the term that Jurist prefers over “regulation” in explaining how our minds come to integrate affective experience. Jurist, as both a philosopher and a psychologist, has an understanding of emotions and affects that most readers of this journal do not have because such terms as “emotion,” “affect,” and “feeling” or “sentiment” have a long complex history in philosophical discourse long before they ever became a focus of scientific psychology, one that dates back to Greek thought and that involves important terminological and conceptual shifts over some 2,500 years. Jurist’s book contains much that is of value, especially for psychoanalytic therapists needing to learn something of clinical value about the scientific literature on emotion research. Additionally, Jurist is always sensitive to the broader sociocultural implications of a topic that can so easily be instantiated, as it often is in academic psychology, within a reductionistic framework that emphasizes emotion regulation and emotional control.