No portrait of van der Kolk is complete without addressing the profound controversy that has shadowed his career. In 2018, at the height of his fame following The Body Keeps the Score , the Boston University School of Medicine, where he was a tenured professor, terminated him. Simultaneously, he was dismissed as the director of the Trauma Center at the Justice Resource Institute (JRI).
A Dutch-born psychiatrist who has spent his career straddling the line between rigorous science and fringe therapies, van der Kolk is best known for his 2014 bestseller, The Body Keeps the Score . In a medical landscape dominated by pills and talk therapy, van der kolk emerged as a heretic and a visionary, arguing that the traditional medical model had gotten trauma fundamentally wrong. His central thesis is both simple and devastating: trauma is not a story that happened in the past; it is a physiological imprint that lives in the present. bessel van der kolk
This observation led van der Kolk to a crucial epiphany: No portrait of van der Kolk is complete