Interview
Interview Leslie Greenberg
”The future is in the hands of the students” Laura Mikkelsen, 4. semester Emotion is one of the main topics in the first courses we undertake as psychology students at Aarhus University. We discuss its evolutionary roots, the physiological changes, the cognitive appraisals, and especially, whether emotions are universal or not. The last debate is used to question the importance of emotions and their role in psychology, but according to the founder of emotion-focused therapy (EFT), Leslie Greenberg, the centrality of emotion in human experience, human change, and therefore psychotherapy, is unambiguous. Zoom lets us call him up on a spring morning in Canada to talk about his decades of work with research in psychotherapy, humanistic therapies, and the current dogmas in the field of psychology. Since Leslie Greenberg’s first studies in the 1970’s he has been interested in the processes of psychotherapy as he studied several humanistic approaches to psychotherapy including gestalt therapy, client-centered therapy, and existential therapy. In the following decades, he integrated these different approaches in the context of emotion theory when he developed and refined EFT. The approach evolved as a result of Leslie Greenberg’s research which led him to see emotion as the most fundamental human process: There are many levels of human chan-
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ge. You can get a cognitive change or a conceptual narrative change, but the real change has to come at the level of automatic emotional processing, and you need to change emotions–but you need to feel an emotion to change an emotion. It has been remarkable that psychology and psychotherapy have existed for more than a hundred years, but the problem has never been defined as being emotional processing. You have unconscious motivation, you have behavior, you have interaction, you have cognition, but it is really emotion. Emotions underlie behavior, cognition, and interaction, so we want to change emotion. We are helping people processing their emotions–that is the important thing, and we believe that emotions are the most fundamental human process. So, whereas Descartes said: “I think, therefore I am” we say: “I feel, therefore I am”. Immediately, Barrett and the rest of the curriculum from cognitive psychology starts running through my mind. Emotions, feelings, affect – how do they differ from one another? And more importantly, what aspect does EFT refers to? Luckily, Leslie Greenberg is ready with a great answer: There is no clear definition of any of these words, so when I lecture and write, I use them interchangeably to fit the context just to what sounds better or seems better. When you are working with clients you of-
