Bessel van der Kolk
Psychiatrist and trauma researcher who showed how trauma physically rewires the brain and body, reshaping the field of traumatic stress treatment.
について
Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., is a Dutch-American psychiatrist, researcher, and one of the world’s foremost authorities on traumatic stress. He is a Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine and the founder of the Trauma Center in Brookline, Massachusetts, which has been a pioneering institution in trauma treatment research and clinical practice.
Van der Kolk’s career-defining contribution is demonstrating—through neuroimaging, clinical research, and decades of patient work—that trauma is not merely a psychological event but a physiological one. His bestselling book The Body Keeps the Score synthesized this research for a general audience and became a cultural phenomenon, spending years on the New York Times bestseller list and fundamentally changing how millions of people understand their own responses to adversity.
His advocacy for body-based therapeutic approaches—including EMDR, yoga, neurofeedback, and somatic experiencing—alongside traditional talk therapy was initially controversial in psychiatric circles but is now supported by substantial clinical evidence. Van der Kolk’s work bridges neuroscience, clinical psychology, and attachment theory, providing a comprehensive framework for understanding how humans are shaped by and can heal from traumatic experience.
