Diana Fosha, PhD, is the developer of AEDP™ psychotherapy, a healing-based, transformation-oriented treatment model. And she is Founder and Director of the AEDP Institute. For the last 20 years, Diana has been active in promoting a scientific basis for a healing-oriented, attachment-emotion-transformation focused trauma treatment model. Fosha’s work focuses on integrating positive neuroplasticity, recognition science and developmental dyadic research into experiential and transformational clinical work with patients. Her most recent work focuses on promoting flourishing as a seamless part of the AEDP therapeutic process of transforming emotional suffering. Drawing on affective neuroscience, attachment theory, mother-infant developmental research, and research documenting the undreamed-of plasticity in the adult brain, AEDP is an experiential clinical practice which reflects the integration of science, research and practice in psychotherapy.
Based in New York City, where she lives and practices, Fosha has been on the faculties of the Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology of NYU and St. Luke’s/Roosevelt Medical Centers (now Mount Sinai) in NYC, and of the doctoral programs in clinical psychology at the Derner Institute for Advanced Psychological Studies at Adelphi University and at The City University of New York.
She is the author of The Transforming Power of Affect: A Model for Accelerated Change (Basic Books, 2000); co-author, with Natasha Prenn, of Supervision Essentials for Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (APA, 2016); 1st editor, with Dan Siegel and Marion Solomon, of The Healing Power of Emotion: Affective Neuroscience, Development & Clinical Practice (Norton, 2009), and editor of the newest book on AEDP, Undoing Aloneness and the Transformation of Suffering into Flourishing: AEDP 2.0 (APA, 2021). Diana is the author of numerous articles on AEDP’s attachment-emotion-transformation focused experiential treatment model. She has contributed chapters to, among others, Clinical Pearls of Wisdom: 21 Leading Therapists Offer their Key Insights, edited by M. Kerman (Norton, 2009); Complex Traumatic Stress Disorders: An Evidence-Based Clinician’s Guide, edited by C. Courtois & J. D. Ford (Guilford, 2009); Healing Moments in Psychotherapy, edited by Dan Siegel and Marion Solomon (Norton, 2013); Advances in Contemplative Psychotherapy: Accelerating Transformation, edited by Loizzo, Neale & Wolf (Norton, 2017), Moments of Meeting in Psychoanalysis: Interaction and Change in the Therapeutic Encounter, edited by Lord (Routledge: 2017) and The Comprehensive Handbook of Psychotherapy, Volume 1: Psychodynamic and Object Relations Therapies, edited by J. J. Magnavita (Wiley, 2002). Four DVDs of her live AEDP clinical work, including one documenting a complete 6-session treatment, and one on clinical supervision, have been issued by the American Psychological Association (APA). Learn more and purchase here.
Described by psychoanalyst James Grotstein as a “prizefighter of intimacy,” and by David Malan as “the Winnicott of [experiential] psychotherapy,” Diana Fosha is known for her powerful, precise yet simultaneously poetic and evocative affective writing and presenting style. Diana’s phrases — “undoing aloneness,” “existing in the heart and mind of the other,” “True Other,” “make the implicit explicit and the explicit experiential,” “stay with it and stay with me,” “rigor without shame” and “judicious self-disclosure” — capture the ethos of AEDP.