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Over the past fifteen years Allan Schore's several books, numerous articles, and many talks have had an important impact on the world of psychoanalysis and analytic psychotherapy. (Schore is on the clinical faculty, University of California David Geffen School of Medicine.) For a profession hungry for validation and overwhelmed by the difficulty,
inaccessibility, and sheer volume of research findings, Schore, through his literature reviews and integration of interdisciplinary research, has been a lifesaver and a cheerleader for psychoanalysis. His emphasis on the importance of affective communication embedded in unconscious right brain functioning has provided research-based neuropsychiatric support for recent clinical and theoretical advances in the areas of trauma, attachment, and developmental pathologies. Reading Schore is both an experience of the new, evident especially in his ability to describe research that might be unknown to clinicians, and of the old, as if he were saying something we already know and practice. Affective resonance and responsiveness, the importance of empathy, the function of dissociation and projection, the crucial (perhaps central) role of nonverbal and embodied communication, all have been discussed at length in the recent analytic literature. Even before Schore, not many would have disputed their importance. But it is nice to be told that research has verified that we are on the right path and that the therapeutic approaches we have developed have “proven effectiveness.”
Schore's new volume, The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy, continues his ongoing effort to report on and integrate the vast literature that has accumulated over the past several decades. The book is divided into two parts, the first five chapters addressing issues of affect regulation, clinical neuropsychoanalysis, and psychotherapy, and the final six dealing with a range of issues including family law, ethology, and the etiology of borderline personality disorde