Description
In this workshop Dr. Schore will offer a presentation and discuss the essential themes of his recently published book, Right Brain Psychotherapy. Referring to his current clinical, research, and theoretical studies on attachment theory, neuropsychoanalysis, traumatology, and psychotherapy, he will discuss the right brain emotional, relational, and neurobiological change mechanisms that lie at the core of the co-created therapeutic relationship. This lecture will also present an interpersonal neurobiological model of psychotherapeutic expertise for working with early-forming therapeutic reenactments of attachment trauma, especially in heightened affective moments of treatment. Dr. Schore will contend that our conception of the expert clinician has changed, from one who offers left brain insight-oriented interpretations in order make the unconscious conscious to an empathic clinician whose right brain optimally detects, processes, and regulates the patient’s right brain unconsciously communicated implicit bodily-based affective states in order to treat the patient’s symptomatology and promote the patient’s emotional and social development. He will discuss how very recent groundbreaking hyperscanning studies of the brains of both the patient and the therapist in a psychotherapy session confirm his model of synchronized right brain-to-right brain nonverbal emotional communication of attachment dynamics within the burgeoning therapeutic alliance. Offering both clinical data and a large body of interdisciplinary research he will suggest that neurobiologically-informed, emotionally-focused treatment facilitates therapeutic changes in the connectivity of the “emotional” “social” right brain, and that the incorporation of current studies of brain laterality research into models of the therapeutic relationship allows for a deeper understanding of not only why but how psychotherapy works, “beneath the words” of the patient and therapist.