Knowing, Not-Knowing and Sort-of-Knowing by Petrucelli Jean;

Author:Petrucelli, Jean;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Karnac Books
Published: 2011-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

PART V

HOW DO WE KNOW AND HOW DOES

IT CHANGE? THE ROLE OF IMPLICIT

AND EXPLICIT MIND/BRAIN/BODY

PROCESSES

CHAPTER TWELVE

The right brain implicit self:

A central mechanism of the

psychotherapy change process

Allan N. Schore, Ph.D.

After a century of disconnection, psychoanalysis is returning to its psychological and biological sources, and this re-integration is generating a palpable surge of energy and revitalization of the field. At the centre of both theoretical and clinical psychoanalysis is the concept of the unconscious. The field’s unique contribution to science has been its explorations of the psychic structures and processes that operate beneath conscious awareness in order to generate essential survival functions. In the last ten years implicit unconscious phenomena have finally become a legitimate area of not only psychoanalytic but also scientific inquiry. Writing to the broader field of psychology, Bargh and Morsella (2008: 73) now conclude, “Freud’s model of the unconscious as the primary guiding influence over every day life, even today, is more specific and detailed than any to be found in contemporary cognitive or social psychology”.

An important catalyst of this rapprochement is the contact point between modern neuropsychoanalysis and contemporary neuro-science. Current neurobiological researchers now conclude, “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, Zelazo and Stuss 2004: 7). Indeed, over the last two decades I have provided a substantial amount of interdisciplinary evidence which supports the proposition that the early developing right brain generates the implicit self, the human unconscious (Schore 1994, 1997, 2003a, 2005, 2007, 2009b). My ongoing studies in regulation theory focus on the essential right brain structure–function relationships that underlie the psychobio-logical substrate of the human unconscious, and they attempt to elucidate the origin, psychopathogenesis, and psychotherapeutic treatment of the early forming subjective implicit self.

In this chapter I demonstrate that current clinical and experimental studies of the unconscious, implicit domain can do more than support a clinical psychoanalytic model of treatment, but rather this interdisciplinary information can elucidate the mechanisms that lie at the core of psychoanalysis. The body of my work strongly suggests the following organizing principles. The concept of a single unitary “self” is as misleading as the idea of a single unitary “brain”. The left and right hemispheres process information in their own unique fashions, and this is reflected in a conscious left lateral-ized self system (“left mind”) and an unconscious right lateralized self system (“right mind”). Despite the designation of the verbal left hemisphere as “dominant” due to its capacities for explicitly processing language functions, It is the right hemisphere and its implicit homeostatic-survival and affect regulation functions that are truly dominant in human existence (Schore 2003a, 2009b). Over the life span the early-forming unconscious implicit self continues to develop to more complexity, and it operates in qualitatively different ways from the later-forming conscious explicit self. Recall Freud’s (1920/1943: 188) assertion that the unconscious is “a special realm, with its own desires and modes of expression and peculiar mental mechanisms not elsewhere operative”.

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