The latest groundbreaking, interdisciplinary work from one of our most eloquent and significant writers about emotion and the brain.
An exploration into the adaptive functions of the emotional right brain, which describes not only affect and affect regulation within minds and brains, but also the communication and interactive regulation of affects between minds and brains. This book offers evidence that emotional interactions reflect right-brain-to-right-brain affective communication. Essential reading for those trying to understand one-person psychology as well as two-person psychology relationships, whether clinical or otherwise.
In this extraordinary volume, Allan Schore shows how the right-lateralized unconscious mind and its relationship to the left-lateralized conscious mind offer a neurobiologically-informed model of psychodynamic psychotherapy and a psychodynamic model of neuropsychoanalysis. Clinicians will especially appreciate Schore’s illustrations of the changes in the patient’s and therapist’s unconscious right minds over the course of the treatment, beneath and beyond the verbal narratives – through the relationship itself. Through a unified theory of psychoanalysis as ‘the science of the unconscious mind,’ Schore shows what it means to be human. He bridges past, present, and future as well as childhood and adulthood, while simultaneously bridging neuroscience, the individual mind, and human relatedness.
Philip M. Bromberg, PhD
author of The Shadow of the Tsunami: and the Growth of the Relational Mind
In this meticulously researched and lovingly crafted masterpiece, the trailblazing, internationally renowned neuroscientist-clinician Allan Schore, Ph.D., evolves his interpersonal neurobiological paradigm of Right Brain Psychotherapy to the next level of nuanced refinement. In what is most certainly destined to become a classic in the field Schore celebrates the beauty and quantum power of a therapeutic dynamic that invites mutual surrender and the co-creation of precious moments of authentic meeting ‘beneath the words’ – once both participants dare to bring heart and soul to the ever-deepening, affectively attuned resonance between them. You would not be in your ‘right mind’ were you to pass up this opportunity to evolve to your own next level by immersing yourself in the magic of Schore’s seamless integration of left-brain neuroscientific theory and right-brain clinical practice.
Martha Stark, MD
Faculty, Harvard Medical School, award-winning author of Relentless Hope: The Refusal to Grieve
Allan Schore is one of the leading figures in the brain-based understanding of psychotherapy today. This book is an outstanding work on the topic of the importance of the right hemisphere in attachment, in trauma, and in the establishment of the emotionally mature human individual, by its greatest theoretician. It is both humane and scientific, of practical import, and intellectually stimulating.
Iain McGilchrist, MA (Oxon), MB, FRCPsych, FRSA
author of The Master and His Emissary
Being interdisciplinary in the best sense of the word, it is quite remarkable how Alan N. Schore connects psychotherapy research with neuroscientific laterality research, two fields that rarely interact and have very different scientific traditions….
“Right Brain Psychotherapy” is an important and timely addition to the laterality literature…. I hope that it inspires more researchers to investigate possible applications of laterality research in psychotherapy, as this highly relevant field certainly deserves much more exploration.
Sebastian Ocklenburg
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Biopsychology, Department of Psychology, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany