Paradigm Shift: The Right Brain and the Relational Unconscious
At the Division 39 Spring 2008 Meeting, Dr. Schore received The Division of Psychoanalysis Scientific Award, “In Recognition of Outstanding Contributions to Research, Theory and Practice of Neuroscience and Psychoanalysis.” In accepting the award, he presented an address. The following is an abbreviated version of the Award Address. The editor.
It is my great pleasure to accept this award, especially because it recognizes my work in both neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Amongst others, I’d like to thank Bill MacGillivray for allowing me to present my ideas on neuropsychoanalysis and regulation theory in an ongoing column in Psychologist–Psychoanalyst. On this occasion I’d like to take the opportunity to share my views on the current state of the field, especially looking at its increasing connections with the disciplines that border psychoanalysis. As you are well aware, the term paradigm shift is now appearing across a number of clinical and applied sciences, and the term “interdisciplinary” is highly valued in all fields.
After a century of disconnection, psychoanalysis is returning to its biological and psychological sources, and this re-integration is generating a palpable surge of energy and revitalization within the field. Psychoanalysis originated at end of 19th century in Freud’s (1966/1895) “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” the goal of which was to “furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science.” In the middle of the last decade, one hundred years after Freud’s initial attempt to integrate mind and brain I asserted, “At this moment, right at the midpoint of what is being described as ‘The Decade of the Brain,’ is a rapprochement between psychoanalysis and neurobiology now at hand? Right off, let me state straight out that to my mind, the time is right” (Schore, 1997).
At the core of psychoanalysis is the concept of the unconscious. The field’s unique contribution to science has been its explorations of the psychic structures that operate beneath conscious awareness in order to generate essential survival functions. In the last 10 years other sciences have become extremely interested in these nonconscious “implicit” phenomena. Writing to the broader field of psychology, Bargh and Morsella (2008) now conclude, “Freud’s model of the unconscious as the primary guiding PARADIGM SHIFT: THE RIGHT BRAIN AND THE RELATIONAL UNCONSCIOUS ALLAN N. SCHORE, PHD influence over every day life, even today, is more specific and detailed than any to be found in contemporary cognitive or social psychology.” A perusal of journals within and without psychoanalysis clearly reveals that a bidirectional dialogue currently exists between psychoanalytic studies of the unconscious processes of the mind and neuroscience’s studies of the nonconscious processes of the brain.
In his early attempts to chart the unique landscape of the inner world Freud (1963/1920) described the unconscious as “a special realm, with its own desires and modes of expression and peculiar mental mechanisms not elsewhere operative.” Following his dictum that “the unconscious is the infantile mental life,” and that in early ontogeny the unconscious matures before the conscious, in my first book I offered interdisciplinary evidence which indicated that the early maturing right brain represents the developing Freudian unconscious, the system that supports “the major sources of the primary forces that drive human emotion, cognition, and behavior” (Schore, 1994). In ongoing work I continue to provide both experimental and clinical evidence that the right hemisphere “implicit self” represents the biological substrate of the human unconscious.
This model is confirmed across a number of disciplines. Neuroscience authors are concluding, “The right hemisphere has been linked to implicit information processing, as opposed to the more explicit and more conscious processing tied to the left hemisphere” (Happaney et al., 2004). Current psychophysiological workers are reporting, “We found that the left hemisphere more than the right can mediate conscious elaboration…This result is in line with previous research, that underlined a left-conscious/ right-unconscious dichotomy” (Balconi & Lucchiari, 2008). In these ongoing studies the unique contribution of contemporary psychoanalysis is, of course, the concept of a relational unconscious. Summarizing this work I have proposed that the right brain implicit self acts as “a cohesive, active mental structure that continuously appraises life’s experiences and responds according to its scheme of interpretation,” and that “In contrast to a static, deeply buried storehouse of ancient memories buried and silenced in ‘infantile amnesia,’ contemporary intersubjective psychoanalysis now refers to a ‘relational unconscious,’ whereby one unconscious mind communicates with another unconscious mind” (Schore, 2003).
But even more, and perhaps unexpectedly, recent clinical and experimental studies are highlighting the essential evolutionary role of a bodily-based affective unconscious, not only in infancy but over the later stages of the life span. Studies clearly show that the unconscious processing of emotional stimuli is specifically associated with activation of the right and not left hemisphere. Current neuropsychiatric research indicates “In most people, the verbal, conscious and serial information processing takes place in the left hemisphere, while the unconscious, nonverbal and emotional information processing mainly takes place in the right hemisphere” (Larsen et al., 2003). As psychoanalysis has moved from a zeitgeist of a behavioral psychology to a cognitive psychology, we now are entering into a period that emphasizes “the primacy of affect.”
I suggest that the ongoing paradigm shift across all sciences is from conscious, explicit, analytical, verbal, and rational left brain to unconscious, integrative, nonverbal, bodily-based emotional processes of the right brain. Tracking this paradigm shift, in three volumes and numerous articles I have suggested that nonconscious right brain affective processes lie at the core of the “implicit–emotional–corporeal self,” the biological substrate of the human unconscious, and are central to a deeper understanding of the fundamental mechanisms that drive development, psychopathogenesis, and psychotherapy.
In a recent editorial in Motivation and Emotion, the editor Richard Ryan (2007) describes the primacy of affective processes in the human experience:
After three decades of the dominance of cognitive approaches, motivational and emotional processes have roared back into the limelight …Thus, we are living in an epoch where motivation and emotion “matter,” not only in an abstract theoretical sense, but also as they inform applied work in areas such as health care, psychotherapy, education, sports, religion, or other domains.
With respect to clinical psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in general, the paradigm shift is from conscious cognition to unconscious emotion.