Dr. Dan Siegel

Dr. Siegel is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA. He is also the Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute which focuses on the development of mindsight, teaches insight, empathy, and integration in individuals, families and communities.

Dr. Siegel has published extensively for both professional and lay audiences. His five New York Times bestsellers are: Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence, Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human, Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain, and two books with Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D: The Whole-Brain Child, and No-Drama Discipline. His other books include: The Developing Mind, The Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology, Mindsight, The Mindful Brain, and The Mindful Therapist. He has also written The Yes Brain and The Power of Showing Up with Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D. Additionally, Dr. Siegel serves as the Founding Editor for the Norton Professional Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology which currently contains over seventy textbooks.

Sample Course Lecture

He says: There is something in between. This declaration comes from the need to say something ‘scientific’, new and special: in interpersonal communication there is nothing mysterious or unknown ‘in between’ (comunitating subjects). There are signals transmitted and received, these signals are characterized by the information they contain, but this is nothing new: all processes of our physical world are accompanied by the information exchange. There is survival-useful (SU) and survival-harmful (SH) information (more about this see Robert U. Ayres), e.g., saying to themselves and to all the world that Germans  are guilty for cruelty and damage made to many Europeans in the WWII, is the SU-information, and saying to themselves and to the whole world that Russians have not occupied East-European countries, have not extinguished their best people and have not forced them into their army, have not looted their countries and have not raped hundreds of thousands of women – is SH-information, which delays their progress and endangers the survival of humanity.  But this is a bit different issue, not very often studied by psychoterapeutists. Psychotherapy investigates the processes in the comunitating subjects .

But this is not important. Dr. Siegel is one of the best contemporary psychotherapeuts, his best book (I translated it into Latvian) is, although he writes in a forword, that the book is not a self-help manual, his book Mindsight is just this: it is close to the psychotherapeutic textbook and self-help manual. In this book he teaches his pacients (and, of course, the readers!) to learn to start feel own body (and mind) signals and processes, and to start understand and manage them. We can change only the issues we understand.