The right brain is dominant in psychotherapy

This article discusses how recent studies of the right brain, which is dominant for the implicit, nonverbal, intuitive, holistic processing of emotional information and social interactions, can elucidate the neurobiological mechanisms that underlie the relational foundations of psychotherapy. Utilizing the interpersonal neurobiological perspective of regulation theory, I describe the fundamental role of the early developing right brain in relational processes, throughout the life span. I present interdisciplinary evidence documenting right brain functions in early attachment processes, in emotional communications within the therapeutic alliance, in mutual therapeutic enactments, and in therapeutic change processes. This work highlights the fact that the current emphasis on relational processes is shared by, crossfertilizing, and indeed transforming both psychology and neuroscience, with important consequences for clinical psychological models of psychotherapeutic change. Keywords: affect regulation, attachment, right brain In 2009, the American Psychological Association invited me to offer a plenary address, "The Paradigm Shift: The Right Brain and the Relational Unconscious." In fact, that was one of the first times an APA plenary address was given by a member in independent practice, and by a clinician who was also psychoanalytically informed. Citing 15 years of my interdisciplinary research, I argued that a paradigm shift was occurring not only within psychology but also across disciplines, and that psychology now needed to enter into a more intense dialogue with its neighboring biological and medical sciences. I emphasized the relevance of developmental and affective neuroscience (more so than cognitive neuroscience) for clinical and abnormal psychology. And so I reported that both clinicians and researchers were now shifting focus from left brain explicit conscious cognition to right brain implicit unconscious emotional and relational functions Over this same time, in parallel to psychological advances in psychotherapy, the paradigm shift to a relational "two-person psychology" had also progressed within neuroscience, especially in the discipline of interpersonal neurobiology. In this article, I briefly summarize my work in that field, utilizing the relational perspective of regulation theory A major purpose of regulation theory is to construct more complex theoretical models that can generate both heuristic experimental research and clinically relevant formulations of human social-emotional development. My studies in attachment neurobiology indicate that mother-infant relational communications operate rapidly, beneath levels of conscious awareness, while my research in developmental neuropsychoanalysis describes the early evolution of a "relational unconscious" and a right lateralized "social brain" that represents the biological substrate of the human unconscious. A large body of brain laterality studies now confirms the principle that "The left side is involved with conscious response and the right with the unconscious mind&quot

Early interpersonal neurobiological assessment of attachment and autistic spectrum disorders

There is now a strong if not urgent call in both the attachment and autism literatures for updated, research informed, clinically relevant interventions that can more effectively assess the mother infant dyad during early periods of brain plasticity. In this contribution I describe my work in regulation theory, an overarching interpersonal neurobiological model of the development, psychopathogenesis, and treatment of the early forming subjective self system. The theory models the psychoneurobiological mechanisms by which early rapid, spontaneous and thereby implicit emotionally-laden attachment communications indelibly impact the experience-dependent maturation of the right brain, the emotional brain. Reciprocal right-lateralized visual-facial, auditory-prosodic, and tactile-gestural nonverbal communications lie at the psychobiological core of the emotional attachment bond between the infant and primary caregiver. These affective communications can in turn be interactively regulated by the primary caregiver, thereby expanding the infant’s developing right brain regulatory systems. Regulated and dysregulated bodily-based communications can be assessed in order to determine the ongoing status of both the infant’s emotional and social development as well as the quality and efficiency of the infant-mother attachment relationship. I then apply the model to the assessment of early stages of autism. Developmental neurobiological research documents significant alterations of the early developing right brain in autistic infants and toddlers, as well profound attachment failures and intersubjective deficits in autistic infant-mother dyads. Throughout I offer implication of the theory for clinical assessment models. This work suggests that recent knowledge of the social and emotional functions of the early developing right brain may not only bridge the attachment and autism worlds, but facilitate more effective attachment and autism models of early intervention