Dr. Allan Schore

I never realized it was anger. And at that point in time, the empathic therapist who's synchronizing, we are both literally now in that right temporal parietal junction. But the right temporal parietal junction is what sends the communications and receives the communications. Got me here?

So essentially that's where our linkage is and we are now literally in a right brain to right brain communication. And what they found was during a real psychotherapy situation where the patient comes in and they're there because they have interpersonal relationships problems and emotional problems and they're face to face and they're eye to eye

and they're tracking each other like that, you'll find that synchronization. So the synchronization between my right temporal parietal and your right temporal parietal is a right brain to right brain communication. That right brain to right brain communication is always occurring in that kind of a context. And therefore, the most important new change in psychoanalysis

is that the unconscious is more than just happening at dreams. It's happening at all points because the unconscious we now know is a relational unconscious. It communicates with another relational unconscious, right brain to right brain. And this has really changed so much now in our understanding about what psychotherapy is about also. And certainly I want to point out the major,

Change mechanism in psychotherapy now is not insight. It's not cognitive insight. It's more the ability to have an emotionally laden conversation with another human being. and to make emotional connections with another human being, which is why the therapeutic relationship really is the vector of the change.

And that's very different than the old days was your unconscious is here, the analyst is there, I'm now going to interpret what you're doing as you are sinking down into the right, but I'm going to stay up left and interpret it. That's why there was a real limitation to that. And that's why psychoanalysis really changed now also to a face-to-face contact, not just the couch also.

Well, I think that it's, first of all, the right temporal parietal junction is the posterior and the right orbital frontal is the cortex. So the whole right brain there, so to speak.

Yeah, the orbital frontal is the regulation part of it. the temporal parietal junction is the communication part of it. So the whole key is the communication of emotion and the regulation of emotion.

The surrender is the colossal switch out of the left into the right.

Yes. And clearly one of the, first of all, there has been a lot of neuroscience done on music. And incidentally, most of that is right brain, showing right brain activation in music. The key here, even more than that, It's particular music to me. It has a particular meaning to me, subjectivity. And a lot shows that music is essentially a mechanism of affect regulation.

But I want to suggest to you that pets are also a mechanism of affect regulation.

Absolutely. And maybe by the same things, I want to suggest, I think that the communication between dogs, and I've had four dogs myself... is that literally it's tactile, it's the touch of that animal, it's the prosody of the voice because literally that dog understands the prosody of the voice and also to some extent I think they can read our faces.

But more than that, there's one other sense which I haven't brought up which is part of human relationship and that's smell. Okay, and this is overlooked in human relationship. But in real intimate contacts between human beings, the smell is really a key there. You know, think about sexual arousal. So dogs are really very strong on our smell, et cetera.

But if attachment is a reunion after a separation,

come home there's that dog sitting there literally and immediately you're down regulating the day you have now taken off the whole left hemisphere and our whole stresses of all of that and you're now shifting left into right and we use the mechanisms that are available to do that and music is one of the ways to do that so in some sense music is an auto regulation although music can be live music and then it's more than that so that's the case

There have been studies to show that during a performance performance, there is a synchrony, there are synchronized states between the performer and the audience. And it's certainly, they're all, you can have thousands of people literally in that same synchronized state at that point in time.

The right brain is more connected into the body than the left brain.

There has been ongoing dialogue between us for some time. But Ian talks about that the right brain literally is much more connected into the body and incidentally is also more dominant for will. Unconscious will is more important than conscious will. which you kind of, at the very beginning, we were talking about the left versus the right.

There's a classical work by an analyst by the name of Manuel Hammer, and he was talking about how to reach the affect. And what he suggested is that there are certain moments in the session when literally my body, in order to pick up the communications of the patient, I lean back. I'm not leaning forward. I lean back and let the atmosphere literally come over me, so to speak.

But notice here, what I'm talking about, what the therapist is attempting to do is to make an emotional connection, an empathic connection. And in order to make an empathic connection, You're leaning back. You're leaning back. And literally, as you lean back, all of a sudden, you're able to pick up things and hear things that you didn't see before, so to speak.