Posted by Pfinstegg on October 12, 2004, at 13:11:14
Institutes meeting held in New York on October 2 was extremely interesting. It was a whole day of neuroscience and case examples. To try to boil it down to the one most important thing I learned, it was about the primacy of the right hemisphere, in both the development of trauma- induced psychiatric illnesses, and in their treatment. It was a novel sight to see psychoanalysts presenting slide talks!
Dr. Alan Schore, who is both an analyst and a neuroscientist, spoke initially about how neglect and/or abuse in the earliest years of life causes the right hemisphere to develop abnormally. There tend to be less connections from the limbic system to the right orbital frontal cortex, so that self-soothing and calming of fear responses take place less efficiently, or perhaps hardly at all. Dissociation was an accepted concept to these therapists, who located it, too, in the right hemisphere. Times of painful neglect, for example, are visualized as oval groups of neurons containing the implicit memories of that painful experience. These areas, also, have less than the normal number of neurons connecting them to surrounding regions of the right hemisphere, so they cannot be modified. Roughly speaking, the right hemisphere= the unconscious.
Therapy for these kinds of trauma was considered to be almost entirely a matter of the client's right hemisphere connecting up with the therapist's right hemisphere! These parts of the brain will evaluate gaze, facial expression, tone and pacing of the voice, body language, etc. The two brains getting into harmony with one another, as a mother's does with her infant's, result in neuronal growth, so the dissociated areas become more connected with the highest centers in the right hemisphere, which can provide soothing and a calmer view of whether a threat is actually present now, as it was in the past. The very final thing that happens is that the therapist and client deliver as much of this information as possible to their left hemispheres, where it can be reflected upon. They gave fascinating clinical examples of how the two people work together, much of the time non-verbally, to bring about needed changes. To sum it up, when a client and therapist's right hemispheres get into harmony, the patient's right hemisphere grows and changes- that's how we get better!
poster:Pfinstegg
thread:402170
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20041002/msgs/402170.html