Dr. Allan Schore

You understand that I was trained in psychoanalysis and I'm a psychodynamic psychotherapist in addition to a scientist, neuroscientist. So the unconscious has been something that I have been aware of and have been writing about and it's a central part of what I'm writing about to this day. Essentially, as we're going to see, I'm suggesting that the right brain is the unconscious mind.

So when you ask how much of things really are conscious and how much are unconscious, I'm also looking at that neurobiologically in terms of how much of activity is going on in the right brain. The right brain is always processing information, always, especially emotional information at levels beneath conscious awareness, especially when you're in an emotional interaction.

So how much really are things conscious? I would say that when it comes to the basic motivations of why we do what we do, 95 to 90% of that is unconscious. And there has been data to show that that is the case. At most, although we think that our conscious mind literally is making all of these decisions, underneath that, at all points in time, the unconscious is operating.

It used to be thought that the unconscious only comes forth in dreams at night. Well, we now know that this right brain is reading unconscious communications between us. Communications, is it safe to be with you? Do you understand what I'm saying? Really the critical ones, always operating and much more important than we had thought itself.

The answer to that is pretty clear at this point in time. And incidentally, some of these questions about the unconscious are provided by neurobiology. But essentially, here's what we know. There was discoveries that were being made in the 80s and the 90s about the human brain growth spurt.

The human brain growth spurt occurs from the last trimester of pregnancy through the second until the third year of life. All of that time is a period of right hemisphere dominance. And actually, there have been six major studies in neuroscience laboratories around the world that have shown that the right hemisphere is dominant during that period of time.

In fact, there's a recent study in Mexico where they looked at two to three months, six to eight months, nine to 12 months. At each point in time, they noticed that the right hemisphere was accelerating its growth, the left was not. So the right is dominant very early. In fact, there's evidence to show that even in utero, there is a right lateralization.

Now remember, the lateralization is part of all systems. And what is lateralized is not only the cortical areas, but the subcortical areas, et cetera. So if you take, let's say, the amygdala, there's a difference between the right amygdala and the left amygdala. And again, the right hemisphere. So the answer to that is very clearly now.

The left hemisphere does not come into a growth spurt until the end of the second year and into the third year, up until that point. Which means everything about attachment, is about right brain dynamics.

Yes, absolutely. And it's occurring during that brain growth spurt while the right hemisphere. So essentially what you have now is that in the baby's brain, that baby's brain is now in a right brain growth spurt. And the mother now is shaping that baby's right brain through the attachment mechanism, through her regulation of that brain. So she's helped shaping that brain for better or for worse.

And incidentally, that means also not only secure attachments, but also the matter, because it's for better or worse, it's also the early evolution of insecure attachments. And we'll talk about what those insecure attachments are. All of those really are being shaped by the right.

What's more, there's evidence to show that it goes right hemisphere, then it goes left hemisphere, and then it goes back into left and back and right along the lifespan. So although you have... A tremendous growth spurt more than any other time in the first two and a half, three years of life. Think now about adolescence where you have another growth spurt.

Is adolescence marked by a right brain growth spurt? It's marked by the initially right and then it goes left. So essentially with puberty and with the onset of testosterone and androgens and estrogens, it shifts now into another growth spurt at that point in time.

which means, just for the record, now the attachment relationship, which is essentially going to be about how we regulate our emotion, because I'll be talking about attachment as about the communication of emotions, right brain to right brain, in the first two years of life, and about the regulation of emotions in that same period of time, etc.,

But ultimately, that leads to the strategies that we have for affect regulation. An attachment is essentially affect regulation, affect communication and affect regulation. So now what you're looking at is you have a mother and an infant. They are communicating with each other, right brain to right brain. And how are they doing it? by face, voice, and gesture.

The mother is now reading the expressions of the baby's face, the visual, the auditory, the prosody of the voice, and then the tactile. So she's picking up these kinds of communications that are coming out of that baby. Tactile, gestural, visual. And she's now picking up those communications now. She's resonating with those communications. And then she is going to regulate those communications.

And that's essentially what it's about. In the end, what we have is strategies of affect regulation. How we regulate affect for the rest of our lives depends upon the attachment relationship of the first two years, which is a right brain to right brain connection. Now, there have been hundreds, thousands of studies on attachment, as you're well aware of at this point in time.

But the key to it, literally, I began this in 1994 with my first book, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self, The Neurobiology of Emotional Development. Okay? Okay. Remember, Bowlby was studying attachment in the 60s. But the problem of emotion really was not picked up. And early on when they were looking at attachment, they were looking at behaviors and they were looking at cognition.

So if you know the attachment literature, remember the strange situation?

I think it's developmental milestones there. You know, I'm thinking that, remember Eric Erickson talking about different stages of life and how you have a hierarchy here, literally, because the attachment is a hierarchy. It starts subcortical and then it goes subcortical. So what he said was that there are changes along the line and that it fits with that. So