The Right Brain and the Origin of Human Nature (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology)

A new, cutting-edge volume of original work from a luminary in neurobiologically-informed models of mental health.

The culmination of three decades of Allan Schore’s groundbreaking work, this book details how the right brain―the psychobiological locus of Freud’s unconscious mind―plays a fundamental role in the early origin of human nature (the general characteristics and feelings attributed to human beings). The early developing right brain not only grounds our bodily―based subjective experience of the world, but also allows us to make sense of it.

This volume offers interdisciplinary and clinical evidence indicating that during human infancy, right brain intersubjectivity (the emotional communication between unconscious minds) and attachment (the subliminal interactive regulation of emotion) underlie the essential foundation of the human personality. Beneath conscious awareness, the early evolving right brain implicitly generates the emotional capacity for both love and hate, ecstasy and agony, good and evil, forgiveness and revenge, creativity and destructiveness―all products of the deeper stratum of human nature.

9 color illustrations

Allan Schore, PhD, is on the clinical faculty of the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, and at the UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, and Development. He is the recipient of the American Psychological Association Division 56: Trauma Psychology "Award for Outstanding Contributions to Practice in Trauma Psychology" and APA's Division 39: Psychoanalysis "Scientific Award in Recognition of Outstanding Contributions to Research, Theory and Practice of Neuroscience and Psychoanalysis."He is also an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He is author of nine seminal volumes, including Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self, Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self, and Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self, as well as numerous articles and chapters. His Regulation Theory, grounded in developmental neuroscience and developmental psychoanalysis, focuses on the origin, psychopathogenesis, and psychotherapeutic treatment of the early forming subjective implicit self. His contributions appear in multiple disciplines, including developmental neuroscience, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, attachment theory, trauma studies, behavioral biology, clinical psychology, and clinical social work. His groundbreaking integration of neuroscience with attachment theory has led to his description as "the American Bowlby" and with psychoanalysis as "the world's leading expert in neuropsychoanalysis." His books have been translated into several languages, including Italian, French, German, and Turkish.