You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This paper is the text of the 7 th Annual John Bowlby Memorial Lecture. Schore states at the outset that attachment theory is a direct outgrowth of Freud's developmental perspective and seeks to equate the neurobiology of subjectivity and intersubjectivity with the experience-dependent self-organization of the early developing right cerebral hemisphere. This structure, he suggests, mediates the development of the unconscious mind as well as being the repository of the unconscious internal working models of the attachment relationship. He stresses that these developments of the right hemisphere are experience-dependent, and that attachment theory is essentially a theory of affect regulation, this being an outcome, in his view, of a variety of psychological therapies. The major contribution of attachment theory to clinical models of psychotherapy is, suggests Schore, its elucidation of the unconscious, non-specific factors that mediate the alliance between a patient and an empathic analyst, and how affect-focused treatment can be demonstrated to alter not only the mental structures of the patient, but also the brain systems that subserve them.
Schore outlines The Neurobiology of a Secure Attachment, the achievement of a secure attachment being the essential task of the first year. It is the establishment of right brain regulation of synchrony between organisms, a process whereby the infant's right brain focuses attention on the right brain of the mother and regulates its output in order to achieve mother-infant affect synchrony which is the antecedent of the infant's own emotional self regulation. Neuro-imaging techniques reveal this to be an inhibitory function of the right hemisphere, thus vindicating Bowlby's prescient assertion that attachment behaviour is organized and regulated by means of a control system. The establishment of affect synchrony is importantly a function of intense mutual gaze between mother and infant and this is contingent on the onset of the cr