http://www.allanschore.com/pdf/SchoreFosha09.

pdf

5 Right-Brain Affect Regulation

An Essential Mechanism of Development, Trauma,
Dissociation, and Psychotherapy
Allan N. Schore

Basic   research   suggests   that   “while   the   left   hemisphere   mediates   most   linguistic
behaviors, the right hemisphere is important for broader aspects of communication”
(van Lancker & Cummings, 1999, p. 95). Incorporating these data into the regulation
theory model of the psychotherapeutic process, I have delineated the central role of
implicit   right­brain   to   right­brain   nonverbal   communications   (facial   expression,
prosody,   gesture)   in   unconscious   transference­countertransference   affective
transactions—an   essential   treatment   element   of   severe   psychopathologies   and   a
common mechanism of all forms of psychotherapy. Interdisciplinary data and updated
clinical   models   lead   me   to   conclude   that   the   right   hemisphere   is   dominant   in
treatment,   and   that   psychotherapy   is   not   the   “talking   cure”   but   the   affect
communicating and regulating cure (Schore, 2005b).

Clinical workers now describe transference as “an established pattern of relating and
emotional responding that is cued by something in the present, but oftentimes calls up
both an affective state and thoughts that may have more to do with past experience
than present ones” (Maroda, 2005, p. 134). In a parallel formulation, neuroscience
now   documents   that   the   right   hemisphere   is   fundamentally   involved   in   the
unconscious   processing   of   emotional   stimuli   (Mlot,   1998),   and   that   the   right
hemisphere   holds   representations   of   the   emotional   states   associated   with   events
experienced by the individual. When that individual encounters a familiar scenario,
representations of past emotional experiences are retrieved by the right hemisphere
and are incorporated into the reasoning process. (Shuren & Grafman, 2002, p. 918)

Furthermore,   “the   right   hemisphere   operates   in   a   more   free­associative,   primary

process manner, typically observed in states such as dreaming or reverie” (Grabner,
Fink, & Neubauer, 2007, p. 228). In line with current developmental and relational
models   I   have   argued   that   right­brain   to   right­brain   communications   represent
interactions of the patient’s unconscious primary­process system and the therapist’s
primary­process  system  (Schore,   1994),  and  that   primary   process  cognition   is   the
major communicative mechanism of the relational unconscious.

128 The Healing Power of Emotion