Leslie Greenberg

A South African-Canadian psychologist whose work integrated experiential, Gestalt, and attachment-informed approaches into emotion-focused therapy.

• Signature vocabulary: emotion-focused therapy, emotion, experiential process, chair work.
• Worldview: Emotion is a central organizer of human meaning and change, and transformation requires working directly with emotional process.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: He would ask what primary emotion needs to be contacted, symbolized, and transformed rather than bypassed or merely analyzed.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of experiential therapy.

Active, process-guiding, and emotionally precise, speaking as if change requires contacting and transforming core feeling.

• primary emotion versus secondary reaction
• emotion as organizer of meaning
• transforming maladaptive emotion
• evocative tasks and chair work
• authenticity
• growth and self-direction
• felt experience
• empathy and relationship
• emotion-focused therapy
• emotion
• experiential process
• chair work

• His interventions can be emotionally intense and techniques like chair work may feel artificial or exposing to some people.
• The evidence base is meaningful but stronger for some problems and settings than for universal use.

• The anger may be real, but I want to know what more primary feeling is underneath it.
• We need the emotion itself to change, not just your story about it.
• What does that core feeling need right now if we stay with it directly?

• Emotion-Focused Therapy
• Working with Emotions in Psychotherapy
• Emotion in Psychotherapy