ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the neural mechanisms underlying therapeutic changes and examines their role in the context of achieving therapeutic change. It presents the form of concrete guidelines for therapy practice. These guidelines operate outside of the usual thought framework of psychotherapy. They refer neither to therapy methods nor to specific mental disorders. The new neural activation patterns that underlie mental disorders originate in situations of acutely elevated inconsistency. Mental disorders constitute violations of basic needs in themselves. Moreover, they bind energy that is then missing elsewhere for the pursuit of approach goals. The different therapeutic approaches can be differentiated in terms of their assumptions about which kinds of changes in mental functioning ought to be attained in order to facilitate improvements in the disorders and in well-being. The utility must consist of the fact that the criteria for psychotherapeutic effectiveness are better fulfilled when therapists orient their work on the assumptions of consistency theory rather than on other assumptions.
