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Patrick Luyten, PhD, is a Full Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, KU Leuven (University of Leuven), Belgium, and Professor of Psychodynamic Psychology at the Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Psychology, UCL (University College London), UK. He is also a Visiting Professor at the Yale Child Study Center in New Haven, Connecticut, USA.
His main research interests are disorders in the affective spectrum (i.e., depression and stress- and pain-related disorders) and personality disorders. He is involved in both basic and interventional research in both of these areas. His basic research focuses on the roles of personality, attachment and social cognition or mentalizing - that is, the capacity to understand oneself and others in terms of mental states - in these disorders from a developmental psychopathology perspective.
In particular, Dr. Luyten is interested in translating knowledge about the mechanisms involved in the causation of psychopathology to the development of new psychotherapeutic treatments, evaluation of the (cost)-effectiveness of these new interventions, and their dissemination to and implementation in routine clinical care.
In recent years, his research has focused on the development of interventions based on an integrative evolutionary perspective rooted in the capacity for epistemic trust and salutogenesis - the capacity to derive benefit from the social environment. In this context, he is involved in efforts to develop a range of interventions, from selective indicated interventions for specific at-risk groups to population-based preventive interventions. He has also been involved in clinical trials of brief psychotherapy for depression and of mentalization-based treatments for people with borderline personality disorder and complex trauma.
The strong interdisciplinary focus of his research has led to extensive collaborations with researchers from different fields, ranging from psychology to neurobiology and health economics. Some of his most longstanding collaborations involve colleagues at the Yale Child Study Center in the USA, the Free University of Amsterdam and Erasmus University Rotterdam in The Netherlands, and the University of Geneva in Switzerland.
Dr. Luyten is Director of the PhD in Psychoanalysis programme at UCL and Programme Director, Mentalization-Based Treatment (MBT) - International Programme. He also heads a treatment service for patients with depression and functional somatic disorders at PraxisP, the treatment centre of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, KU Leuven.
He serves on the editorial board of several scientific journals, including Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training; Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment.
Dr Luyten has published over 350 scientific papers and 100 chapters, has co-authored or edited several books, and has been the recipient of in excess of 60 grants. He is also the recipient of the 2009 Psychoanalytic Research Exceptional Contributions Award from the International Psychoanalytical Association and the 2015 Goethe award for Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Scholarship.
Dr Patrick Luyten is accepting PhD students in the next academic year (2025-26) in the following areas:
(a) Research on the role of epistemic trust and epistemic credulity in individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD). This topic is part of a larger series of studies and involves testing some key hypotheses concerning epistemic trust in relation to attachment and mentalizing, with a recent focus on the role of social media.
(b) Research on parental reflective functioning or parental mentalizing, parents' capacity to understand their own and their children's behaviours in terms of mental states. He is particularly interested in supervising students interested in a series of further analyses of existing large data sets and meta-analysis of the extant literature in this area.
How to contact Patrick Luyten
Patrick Luyten, PhD
Psychoanalysis Unit
Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology
University College London
1-19 Torrington Place
London WC1E 7HB
Email: p.luyten@ucl.ac.uk