Commentary by Allan N. Schore

Over the last two decades, Freud's seminal model of a dynamic, continuously active unconscious mind has undergone a major transformation. Yet most disciplines that border psychoanalysis, “the science of unconscious processes,” are unaware of these important advances. A rapidly evolving trend within contemporary psychoanalysis, at both the levels of theory and practice, is an increasing appreciation of the centrality of affective phenomena. Freud first delineated his ideas about affect in 1895 in the “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” an attempt to create a systematic model of the functioning of the human mind in terms of its underlying neurobiological mechanisms (Schore, 1997a). Although he subsequently contended that the work of psychotherapy is always concerned with affect (1915), it is only recently that an increased emphasis on affect is impacting clinical models.

In this same time frame, after a long period of neglect, the other biological sciences have begun to earnestly explore the problem of emotion. As the first issue of this important journal demonstrates, affect and its regulation are a potential convergence point of psychoanalysis and neuroscience. In the following I will briefly comment upon Solms and Nersessian's and Panksepp's essays, and then, utilizing an interdisciplinary perspective, offer some ideas about affect and its development. Throughout my commentaries, I will argue that a common ground of both psychoanalysis and neuroscience lies in a more detailed charting of the unique structure—function relationships of the right brain, which Ornstein (1997) calls “the right mind.” Psychoanalysis has been interested in the right hemisphere since the split brain studies of the 1970s, when a number of psychoanalytic investigators began to map out its preeminent role in unconscious processes (Galin, 1974; Hoppe, 1977). I will suggest that Freud's affect theory describes a structural system, associated with unconscious primary process affectladen cognit