1 General Introduction 13 1.2 Emotion in psychotherapy: From Omega back to Alpha? In human history, emotions have long been regarded as nonspecific, disruptive activation states [8]. Over time, there came a shift in focus: from trying to understand ‘what is an emotion’, researchers and clinicians shifted their attention to the topic of how to manage – or ‘regulate’ – emotions. In part, this shift seemed an effect of researchers oversimplifying James’ ideas in such a way that he was misread as saying "Emotion is (nothing but) bodily sensations" or even "Emotion is (nothing but) autonomic sensations." Although these simplified versions of James's ideas initially generated an enormous amount of research (e.g., by the likes of Cannon, Bard, Schacter and Singer, et cetera), later on it seriously impeded the study of emotion. After the 1940’s, research on emotion had practically disappeared [7]. Perhaps, an implicit assumption that also fuelled the change of focus was that the notion that in order to come to a better understanding of ‘what is an emotion’, both on an individual level and academically, one must first be able to ‘domesticate’ this ‘wild entity’. The psychoanalytic tradition is one important precursor to the contemporary study of emotion regulation [8]. Since the early days of psychoanalysis, the resolving of disturbing emotions by ‘working them through’ and releasing them - either directly by catharsis or indirectly by psychological displacement or sublimination has been common practice for decades [20-24]. Next, although initially ‘marginalised’, and perhaps mainly admitted as the main target object to regulate and bring under conscious control, emotions have also acquired a central spot in many to most strands of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) [25]. In the tradition of person-centred therapy, emotion has had a prominent role from the outset [26]. Past decades have witnessed a steady increase of treatments, most (at least in part) stemming from one of these three therapeutic traditions, many the result of new ideas and insights originating from a mixture of sources. What they all again have in common, is a clear focus on learning how to regulate emotions. Some perhaps even more than others, contemporary treatments as Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT, person-centred/process-experiential, Greenberg, [2, 27]), Mentalization Based Treatment (MBT, psychodynamic, Fonagy and Bateman [28-30]), and Dialectical Behavioral Treatment (DBT, CBT, Linehan [31-33]), Schema Focused Therapy (SFT, CBT/integrative, Young [34]), or Systems Training for Emotional Predictability and Problem Solving (STEPPS, CBT, Blum [35]) all place great emphasis on how important managing our emotions is for our wellbeing. In this transition from ‘understanding emotion’ to ‘regulating emotion’, academia followed clinical practice from some noticeable distance: until the early 1990s, just 4 publications contained the phrase “emotion regulation”. The pace was picked
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