Freud’s monumental contribution to science was his discovery of the critical role of the dynamic unconscious in everyday life, and in his works he created a theoretical perspective that could bring into focus the unconscious subjective internal world that is instrumental in guiding the individual’s moment-to-moment interactions with the external environment. Drawing upon his early experience as a scientist and neurologist, over the course of his prolific later career as a psychoanalyst all of his investigations represented attempts to elucidate the realms of the mind beneath conscious awareness.

Freud also proposed a developmental model of psychopathogensis, and an applied scientific model, clinical psychoanalysis, a treatment approach that was based upon his understanding of the intrapsychic mechanisms that underlie both normal and abnormal functioning. These interventions, derived from his theoretical base, represented an aggregate of experimental methods that could most effectively access this inner realm, and thereby maximize the possibility of change in the patient’s unconscious internal structural systems. Over the course of his early career as a theoretical and clinical neurologist of the brain and later career as a theoretical and clinical psychologist of the mind, Freud increasingly emphasized the central role of unconscious motivational and affective systems in understanding the human experience (Schore, 1997a; 1998e).

In my earlier commentary in the first issue of this journal (Schore, 1999a), I have suggested that Freud’s remarkably perceptive observations of the unconscious mechanisms that mediate the affective and motivational expressions of intrapsychic structural systems describe the operations of the right brain, or “right mind” (Ornstein, 1997). In this offering, I want to expand upon the major issues about affect that were raised by Freud and addressed by the contributors to the first issue. A central proposal of this work is that the problems of affect and motivation can only be addressed by moving down from the cortex and describing corticosubcortical systems, especially those in the right brain that connect into the body.

Current emotion theorists outside of psychoanalysis are now stressing that emotions involve rapid appraisals of events that are important to the individual (Frijda, 1988) and represent reactions to fundamental relational meanings that have adaptive significance (Lazarus, 1991). This adaptive aspect of the nonverbal communication of emotions was first introduced by Darwin in The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals (1872), and must now be integrated with Freud’s models of affect, motivation, and the unconscious, first presented in his Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895). These respective interpersonal and intrapsychic conceptions of emotion can be brought together in a psychoneurobiological model of the nonconscious processing of socioemotional information by the right brain.

In this continuation of my earlier contribution to this journal, I shall present additional multidisciplnary evidence which indicates that a deeper understanding of affective phenomena can not be attained without also attending to the problem of affect regulation. The essential aspect of this function is highlighted by Westin (1997, p. 542) who asserts that “The attempt to regulate affect - to minimize unpleasant feelings and to maximize pleasant ones - is the driving force in human motivation”. And so I shall focus upon the vertical organization of the right brain, especially the “higher” orbitofrontal areas, which are structurally expanded in the right hemisphere (Falk et al., 1990) and functionally involved in a number of adaptive self-regulatory processes.

At the orbitofrontal level complex cortically processed exteroceptive information concerning the external environment (such as visual and prosodic information emanating from an emotional face) is integrated with subcortically processed interoceptive information regarding the internal visceral environment (such as concurrent changes in bodily states). This cortex thus functions to refine emotions in keeping with current sensory input, and allows for the adaptive switching of internal bodily states in response to changes in the external environment that are appraised to be personally meaningful (Schore, 1998a).

The orbitofrontal system sits at the hierarchical apex of the limbic system, which is more developed in the right rather than the left brain. Due to this fact, this higher cortical system, when acting effficently, can regulate lower level subcortical structures that are involved in the earlier processing stages of socioemotional information. This prefrontolimbic regulatory system therefore acts as an “internal reflecting and organizing agency” (Kaplan-Solms & Solms, 1996). In an attempt to forge deeper links between the right brain and the right mind, I will propose that the orbitofrontal system’s organization of lower levels of the vertically-arranged, right-lateralized limbic system represents the structural intrapsychic mechanism by which higher levels of Freud’s system preconscious regulate lower levels of the system unconscious. In other words, the orbitofrontal system acts as a higher preconscious system that organizes lower level unconscious states of mind-body.

In the following, I will further develop my contention that “the emotion-processing right mind is the neurobiological substrate of Freud’s dynamic unconscious” (Schore, 1999a, p. 125). I will suggest that current knowledge of the development and organization of the orbitofrontal system, which has been called the “senior executive of the emotional brain” (Joseph, 1996), can be used to evaluate Freud’s topographical, structural, and affect theories. And I will then show how this psychoneurobiological perspective can elucidate the roles of right-lateralized unconscious-preconscious systems in a spectrum of affectively-driven adaptive functions.

Jackson and Freud: the shared origin of neuropsychology and psychoanalysis

More than any other discipline, psychoanalysis, the scientific study of the unconscious mind (Brenner, 1980), can offer the other sciences its century-old body of knowledge which describes the unique qualities of the essential processes that continuously operate at levels beneath conscious awareness. To this date psychoanalysis has preferentially looked to “cognitive neuroscience” (Gazzaniga, 1995) to generate models of psychoanalytic phenomena, a field whose studies are mostly targeted to the left hemisphere’s explicit functions in consciously processing verbal materials. And yet the paralimbic networks that underlie the rapid nonconscious processing of affect are known to be more expressed in the right hemisphere (Tucker, 1992; Joseph, 1996). I therefore suggest that the currently expanding fields of "affective neuroscience" (Panksepp, 1998) and "social neuroscience" (Cacioppo & Berntson, 1992) may generate more comprehensive models of the unconscious mind-body mechanisms by which right-lateralized nonverbal systems implicitly guide the individual’s adaptive and maladaptive emotional reactions and motivational states.

The central nervous system circuits that process social and emotional information at unconscious levels are deeply connected into the autonomic nervous system circuits that regulate the functions of every organ in the body, and these are highly lateralized in the right brain (Schore, 1994; 1996; 1997b; 1998a). Porges (1997) describes this ANS-CNS interaction in a contribution entitled “Emotion: An evolutionary by-product of the neural regulation of the autonomic nervous system”:

Emotion depends on the communication between the autonomic nervous system and the brain; visceral afferents convey information on physiological state to the brain and are critical to the sensory or psychological experience of emotion, and cranial nerves and the sympathetic nervous system are outputs from the brain that provide somatomotor and visceromotor control of the expression of emotion (p. 65).

Emotional receptive and expressive functions are thus mediated by the coactivation of limbic circuits of the central nervous system and energy-mobilizing sympathetic and energy-conserving parasympathetic components of the autonomic nervous system. The meaning of this neuroanatomical structure-function relation is that any theoretical model of affective phenomena must take into account not just the “higher” central, but also the “lower” autonomic nervous system. John Hughlings Jackson (1931), the great nineteenth century neurologist who most profoundly influenced Freud (Sulloway, 1979; Goldstein, 1995), described the autonomic nervous system as “the physiological bottom of the mind”. Citing Jackson, Neafsey (1990, p. 147) concludes, “the key to understanding the cerebral cortex, then, appears to be the body.” In other words, affect directs both neuroscience’s right brain and psychoanalysis’s right mInd into the body.

Although Jackson is unknown to most psychoanalysts (and most neuroscientists), the concepts that he first proposed and that Freud later developed are very familiar to clinicians. The essential contributions of Jackson’s groundbreaking neurological theories to a number of Freud’s major concepts has been underscored within the psychoanalytic literature by a number of authors. Solms and Saling (1986) describe Freud’s siding with Jackson against the reigning localizationist tradition of nineteenth century neurology, and Sulloway (1979) who refers to Freud’s contention that “what is really important...is an appreciation of how a hypothetical lesion might affect the whole system, dynamically understood“ (p. 271, my emphasis). In my own work, which incorporates a dynamic systems approach (Schore, 1994; 1997b; in press, b), I continue to expand upon Jackson’s hierachical model by delineating the development of an unconscious regulatory system that is described by Freud.
In describing Jackson’s hierarchical-developmental model, Sulloway (1979, p. 270) states:

Jackson conceived the human mind in terms of a hierarchical series of functional levels, with “higher,” voluntary functions overlaying and “keeping down” the more involuntary, “lower” ones. The lower functional capacities of mind, he maintained, had been superseded in the course of human evolution by the higher ones, which now serve to integrate and observe the whole; and a similar evolutionary sequence was to be observed in individual mental development (my italics)...He also taught that the lower functional levels of mind - dynamically and subconsciously present in all healthy indivuals - are temporarily unleashed during states of sleeping and dreaming.

These lower level functions represent the earliest stage of cognition, characterized by Jackson as preverbal and closely tied to visceral functions. The similarity of Jackson’s lower level functions to Freud’s primary process functions has been pointed out by a number of authors, including Goldstein (1995).

Jackson further suggested that pathology involves a “dissolution”, a loss of inhibitory capacities of the most recently evolved layers of the nervous system that support higher functions (negative symptoms) as well as the release of lower, more automatic functions (positive symptoms). Freud incorporated Jackson’s stratified model, which he specifically praised, into On Aphasia, (1891). Here Freud spoke of a pathological condition as a retrogression to an earlier state of functional development, a conceptualization he used for the rest of his career. In other words, regression, the essential psychoanalytic mechanism of psychopathology for Freud, derives directly from the neurological hierarchical model of Jackson. Indeed, Sulloway (1979, p. 272) refers to “the Jackson-Freud theory of psychical regression”. And at later dates Freud incorporated Jackson’s hierarchical concept of higher levels inhibiting lower levels of function into both his topographic (1900) model of stratified conscious, preconscious, and unconscious systems, and his structural model (1923) of a superego and ego which sit astride the id.

Jackson’s ideas, far ahead of his time, are directly relevant to contemporary neuroscience and psychoanalysis, especially as both are now intensely focusing upon the problems of affect and motivation. Goldstein (1995, p. 498) describes:

Jackson’s observation of aphasics led him to postulate lateralization of two main aspects of mentation - emotive and intellectual. The emotive functions are described as essentially preverbal and automatic, and as residing in the right hemisphere. There all mentation arises, according to nonexperiential functions, and only thereafter are ideas arranged in words in the left hemisphere, where they achieve propositional form.
Jackson’s work deeply influenced not only Freud, but also the ensuing neurological work of Henry Head, Kurt Goldstein, and most significantly, Alexander Luria, who in his youth corresponded with Freud. Luria (1973) states that as opposed to the “narrow localization” of Broca and other nineteenth century neurologists,
Jackson argued that...the cerebral organization of complex mental processes must be approached from the standpoint of the level of their construction rather than that of their localization in particular areas of the brain (p. 25).

Luria continues,
That is why mental functions, as complex functional systems, cannot be localized in narrow zones of the cortex, but must be organized in systems of concertedly working zones, each of which performs its role in a complex functional system, and which may be located in completely different and often far distant areas of the brain (p. 31).
But perhaps even more specifically to the topic at hand, emotional functions, over 25 years ago Luria wrote,
Nearly a century ago, Hughlings Jackson postulated that the right hemisphere...participates directly in perceptual processes and is responsible for more direct, visual forms of relationships with the outside world. This hypothesis failed to attract due attention for many decades, and it is only recently that it has been begun to be appreciated. First of all it was noticed that the right hemisphere is directly concerned with the analysis of direct information received by the subject from his own body and which, it can easily be understood, is much more closely connected with direct sensation than with verbally logical codes (Luria, 1973, p. 165).
Over the last quarter of this century an explosion of studies has confirmed the essential role of the right hemisphere in the processing of emotional information, validating Jackson’s insights. But the primary reason I am presenting Jackson’s view of how the brain operates is to emphasize the fact that the problem of emotion, the theme of this journal’s inauguratory issue, can not be understood with a localizationist perspective, one that still dominates neuroscience. Attempts to localize learning in the hippocampus, drive in the hypothalamus, fear processing in the amygdala, or indeed executive functions in the frontal lobe all represent such a perspective.

This principle is echoed by Bigler et al.:
...seeking out a single structure will never be effective in answering the role of that structure without somehow accounting for the interrelationship of that structure with other systems in its network. Along these lines, in the context of cognitive neuroscience, Goldberg (1995) argues convincingly for a paradigmatic shift from modular to interactive brain systems (1996, p. 34).
A localizationist approach can never offer us a complex model of what Damasio describes as the essential adaptive function of brain systems (1994, p. 90):
The overall function of the brain is to be well informed about what goes on in the rest of the body, the body proper; about what goes on in itself; and about the environment surrounding the organism, so that suitable survivable accommodations can be achieved between the organism and the environment.

The fact that most localization studies, whether utilizing a neuropathological lesion analysis, EEG, or neuroimaging methodology, are looking at only the cortical level presents a particular problem for the deeper study of affective, bodily-based processes. Rather, we must move down from the cortex, and look into the vertical dimension of cortical-subcortical systems. The brain is organized as a complex dynamic system (Siegel, 1999; Lewis & Granic, in press) and any theoretical model of affects, or brain development, or psychopathogenesis, or of the unconscious must also use a dynamic systems approach (Schore, 1997b; in press, b). This clearly suggests that any rapprochement between psychoanalysis and neurobiology must involve a joining of current psychoanalytic conceptions and specifically a Jacksonian and not localizationalist neurobiology. I am suggesting that at their inception, neurology and psychoanalysis were interlinked in a Jacksonian-Freudian co-constructed conception, and so the rapprochement between these disciplines will result in a more complex integrated model of a Jacksonian hierarchical brain and a Freudian unconscious mind.

Continuing a central theme of my ongoing work, in this contribution I will expand my thesis that psychoanalysis’ large and growing body of clinical and theoretical functional descriptions of the structural unconscious describes the functional properties of neuroscience’s structural systems located in the right brain. Clinical neuropsychological studies of adults have linked the right brain and the unconscious (Joseph, 1992) and have been used as a model for generating an “anatomy of the unconscious” (Solms, 1996). But I suggest that only a developmental perspective can trace both how the earliest socioemotional experiences are registered in the deep unconscious, and how they influence the development of the systems which dynamically process unconscious information for the rest of the lifespan. Knowledge of these developmental events offers us a chance to more deeply understand not just the contents of the dynamic unconscious, but its origin, structure, and dynamics.

The fundamental problems of affect, motivation, development, psychopathology, consciousness, and regulation were first presented by Freud in 1895 in the Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), his attempt to create “a psychology which shall be a natural science” (p. 295). I suggest that a deeper understanding of the psychoneurobiological mechanisms of these essential processes may do more than forge deeper links between psychoanalysis and neuroscience. Rather, a common theoretical conception of affect, motivation, and the unconscious mind, and a common clinical conception of the transference-countertransference relationship, could allow for an integration of the different theoretical currents within psychoanalysis. This could move us closer to what Rangell (1997, p. 585) has described as a “total composite theory”, one that should not “equate disparate [theoretical] systems but [should] fuse the valid and enduring elements of all into one.”

The isolated brain and a one-person psychology, the interacting brain and a two-person psychology

On the whole, the major orientations of most of the commentators in the first issue utilize a perspective that traces back to the one Freud used in both On Aphasia (1891) and The Project (1895), that is, an approach grounded in clinical neurology, neuroanatomy, and neuropsychology. This classical methodological approach explores brain-behavior relationships within the context of neurological patient populations and animal lesion studies, and it attempts to model both abnormal and normal processes. Its application to affective phenomena is a rather late development, but as Damasio, Ledoux and others have repeatedly shown, this clinico-anatomical perspective within neuroscience continues to make major contributions to our understanding of not only brain diseases but of the human subjective experience.

I will not describe, as others have done, the limitations of this approach, except to mention that just as psychoanalysis has been criticized for developing models of normal development from the study of neurotic patients, the observations of abnormal brain systems as a model of normal brain function suffers from the same methodological weakness. Modern imaging studies which can noninvasively observe and measure brain states in normal populations can, of course, bypass this limitation. But I would argue, as Brothers (1997) does, that another bias intrinsic to this classical methodology is that it emphasizes a model of an “isolated brain.”
The brain has been implicitly seen as a “knower” of the world, as a socially isolated organ whose purpose is the grasp the inanimate world outside it (Brothers, 1997, p. 66).

This paradigm, with its almost restrictive focus on cognition, the action or faculty of knowing, has been automatically applied as the major, if not exclusive experimental methodology for studying affective phenomena. In these studies, “context,” especially the potential interpersonal influences of the experimenter on the brain activity of the subject is seen as a confounding factor that must be controlled. In animal studies an isolated, passive animal is stressed by intensifying or reducing parameters in the physical environment, and not through exposure to species-specific organismic stressors, and then coping responses are measured. In human studies the subject is usually presented with supraliminal verbal stimuli, aspects of the inanimate world, and not nonverbal facial stimuli of the animate world, and verbal self report or questionnaires are used as response measures. This research is focusing on the capacity of an isolated brain to autoregulate homeostatic alterations to environmentally-induced stress. The focus of many of the commentators in the first issue looks for a deeper understanding of affect within brain circuitries and on internal brain systems that efficiently or inefficently autoregulate the dysregulated psychobiological states and negative affect.

It is no coincidence that this “objective” “intra-brain” neurological perspective is paralleled by psychoanalytic models that emphasize an almost exclusive “intrapsychic” perspective. In this model of an “isolated mind”, motivation is essentially activated by drives, biological forces that originate within the organism, and the unconscious mind operates by the principles of a “one-person psychology” that is elaborated by “classical” or “structural” psychoanalytic theoretical models. During the decades when psychoanalysis was almost totally disconnected from the other sciences, “drive-dominated” models of the psyche were strongly devalued, seen as irrevelevant, and almost totally discarded from psychoanalysis.

And yet current neurobiological studies which highlight the essential role of the adaptive functions of right hemispheric control centers in regulating drive centers in the hypothalamus (Schore, 1994), and of the right brain in the metacontrol of fundamental physiological and endocrinological functions (Wittling & Pfluger, 1990), support the notion of an unconscious mind operating in a “one-person” autoregulatory strategy. This mode does represent one organizational configuration of an unconscious mind, a mode that is accessed when one is processing emotion but not transacting with external social objects.

Clinical psychotherapeutic interventions that are exclusively theoretically grounded in “drive-centered” models of the mind are directed towards a therapeutic goal of increased autoregulation of conscious systems over unconscious systems, of “making the unconscious conscious”. “Consciousness,” a mental state of “cold cognition” is thus seen as the critical manifestation of the human experience, and autonomy and autoregulation the desired end-state. Since intense negative affect interferes with this state of consciousness, it must be autoregulated.

This scenario seems to be uniquely psychoanalytic, and yet psychopharmacological treatments that target negative affective states are also based on attempts to improve the efficiency of autoregulating brain systems. Although these forms of treatment have been seen as antithetical to each other, both share the commonality of being based on a perspective that is biased towards an “isolated brain” and a “one-person psychology” model of mind. I am suggesting that it is no coincidence that in the last paragraph of their concluding remarks Solms and Nersessian’s research application is to use psychoanalytic patients to study the effects of pharmacological agents. In addition, I propose that models that exclusively focus on intra-brain events also lead to etiological conceptions of psychopathology that heavily emphasize the role of genetic and constitutional factors in psychopathogenesis.

As opposed to this intra-brain focus, now extensively used in cognitive neuroscience, the newer fields of affective neuroscience and especially social neuroscience are exploring inter-brain interactions. These disciplines are focusing not only the perceptual, cognitive, and motoric mechanisms within individual brains, but on how these internal processes are interactively regulated and dysregulated by affective transactions with other brains. In this paradigm the individual is exposed to species-specific signals that trigger changes in brain organization associated with the subjective responses that accompany interpersonally-induced stress. In such animal studies, the presence or absence of other organisms are presented as stressors. In human studies, visual representations of emotionally expressive faces, often presented at subliminal levels, are used as experimental stimuli, and then coping responses, usually at a nonverbal, physiological level are measured.

The idea that facial expressions of emotion have an adaptive value in social communication because they reveal one’s inner state to another was first proposed in 1872 by Darwin, a work well known to Freud (Sulloway, 1979). This paradigm has lead to an immense literature on “basic emotions” (e.g., Ekman, 1992; Izard, 1992). But it has also been adopted within the developmental sciences in order to explore the dyadic affective communications within the emotion-transacting attachment relationship. Animal and human psychobiological investigations are now tracing how visual and auditory affective transmissions between the mother’s and infant’s emotionally expressive faces can acts as signals that co-regulate their internal states. These early interactive events are encoded within an internal working model of attachment that guides the individual’s behavior in interpersonal interactions, and this model of the earliest intersubjective experiences is stored in limbic areas of the right brain (Schore, 1994; 1996; 1997b; 1998a, d; 1999c). MacLean (1985, p. 220) defines the adaptive role of the limbic system as the brain network which “derives subjective information in terms of emotional feelings that guide behavior.”

A primary focus of this perspective is on not only subjective affective phenomena but also on the reception and expression of affective communications and “hot cognitions” between the brains of different individuals. Brothers (1997, p. 123) argues that emotion occurs “in the context of evolved systems for the mutual regulation of behavior, often involving bodily changes that act as signals.” Trevarthen asserts that
The emotions constitute a time-space field of intrinsic brain states of mental and behavioral vitality that are signaled for communication to other subjects and that are open to immediate influence from the signals of these others (Trevarthen, 1993, p. 155).

This brain-brain interactive perspective explores the neurobiology of intersubjectivity, that is the mechanisms by which interpersonal interactions coregulate psychobiological states in an intersubjective field created by two interacting brains. Such an area of inquiry seeks the mechanisms described by Freud (1937) at the end of his career: “for the psychical field, the biological field does in fact play the part of the underlying bedrock.”
An intra-brain paradigm thus supports current “relational” models that operate under the principles of a “two person psychology.” “Empathy,” is thus seen as the critical manifestation of the human experience, and relatedness and interactive regulation the desired end-state. Furthermore, these “intersubjective” conceptualizations ...construe the fundamental operation of mind as based in its striving for relational connection and communication, rather than discharge and gratification of endogenous instinctual pressures (Dunn, 1995, p. 724).

“Relational” psychoanalytic models thus emphasize the potent intersubjective influences that flow between two affectively communicating minds (Stolorow & Atwood, 1996; Natterson, 1991). These communications are occurring on both conscious, and more importantly, unconscious levels (Schore, 1994; 1997c; 1998c; in press, a). In this perspective affectively-charged transference-countertransference interactions between patient and therapist represent the mechanisms by which the unconscious mind of one communicates with the unconscious mind of another.

This model of brain-brain interactions is strongly supported by studies of the critical role of the right hemsiphere in the processing of social and emotional information (Schore, 1997) and by research that highlights the role of right brain-to-right brain affective communications, at levels beneath awareness in both mother-infant and therapist-patient dyads (Schore, 1994; 1997c; in press, a). The dominance of the right cortex for organizing “subjective emotional experiences” (Wittling & Roschmann, 1993) implies that the fast-acting affective communications within these dyads can be characterized as “intersubjectivity.” Inter-brain models more so than intra-brain models are thus a more fertile source of hypotheses for understanding how the therapist perceives the unconscious states of the patient, and how emotional communications are transacted within the therapeutic relationship. In addition, an interactive brain perspective emphasizes environmental factors in psychopathology, and models how affectively dysregulating early experiences with misattuned objects mediates the transmission of psychopathologies.

These ideas lead to the suggestion that the next generation of brain research should simultaneously measure the different activation patterns of two brains as they are interacting with each other during different classes of affectively-charged interpersonal interactions. The stress-inducing and stress-regulating transactions of mother-infant and therapist-patient dyads are obvious candidates for such research. Such studies could offer us more detailed information about the subtle socioaffective signals that trigger changes in different patterns of psychobiological state in both brains. These transitions may represent switch points between right brain interactive and autoregulatory modes.

Ultimately, the most powerful theoretical and clinical models of both psychoanalysis and neuroscience must incorporate both aspects of the one-person psychology of an autoregulating isolated brain, and the two-person psychology of an interactively regulating brain. In psychoanalysis both the “classical” and “relational” models share the fundamental assumptions, first promulgated by Freud, of the centrality of early experiences and of the primacy of the dynamic unconscious. Wallerstein (1998) has recently written that theoretically “psychoanalysis is inevitably and necessarily both a one-person and a two-person psychology” (p. 1031), and that clinically “the analyst’s receptive role is to discern as best as possible which psychology the patient is offering at any given moment, and then to react accordingly...” (p. 1033).
I suggest that the adaptive self-regulating processes of the brain-mind-body that occur at levels beneath awareness occurs in two modes, autoregulation, via the processes of a “one-person psychology”, or interactive regulation, under the operations of a “two-person psychology.” The capacity of the unconscious right mind to shift between these two modes, depending upon context, reflects different organizational modes of the right brain, and this adaptive function allows the individual to self-regulate either with or without objects.

Developmental psychoanalytic and developmental neurobiological contributions to affect theory

An exploration of the fundamental processes that mediate self-regulation is a central theme of my ongoing attempts to integrate neuroscience and psychoanalysis. In my book, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development (1994), I present a model of affective ontogeny that is compatible with Jackson’s triadic concepts of an “evolutionary sequence in mental development,” of higher functions superseding and overlying lower functions, and of the preeminent role of the right hemisphere in emotional functions. When applied to affective phenomena, Jackson’s hierarchical principle directs us to look for later-developing higher cortical affect regulatory systems that modulate earlier-developing lower subcortical centers involved in affective processes.

In that volume I present a psychoneurobiological model which holds that the affective events that occur in the early postnatal stages of maturation of the emotional brain are critical to the development of systems that process socioemotional information at levels beneath awareness and regulate affective and motivational states for the rest of the lifespan (Schore, 1994). Over the course of the first two years, the child’s regulatory capacities expand from an initial position where the primary caregiver externally regulates the child’s affective states, to one where the child internalizes this function. This transformation has been described in the developmental psychoanalytic literature as “the processes whereby the primary object relations become internalized and transformed into psychic structure” (Stechler & Halton, 1987, p. 823). And so, I contend that the experiences required for the experience-dependent maturation of the emotion processing right brain are the attachment experiences described by developmental psychoanalysis.

Over the last three decades developmental psychoanalysis has emerged as a central force in the field, so much so that all current theoretical and clinical models now incorporate models of early emotional development. The covers of the two most influential books in the field, Bowlby’s Attachment and Loss (1969) and Stern’s The Interpersonal World of the Infant (1985), as well as my book, contain the visual image of a mother and baby, thus iconically highlighting the centrality of the early events of life to personality formation. These groundbreaking volumes offered not only detailed models of early-appearing affective processes, but also emphasized the preeminent role of the affectively attuned mother in shaping the individual’s emotional capacities. Through their considerable influence, as well as a growing body of work of a number of developmental psychoanalytic researchers and theoreticians, this discipline is now a major contributor of updated and clinically relevant affective concepts into psychoanalysis.

The cover of Panksepp’s remarkable book, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (1998), also contains the image of a mother and baby, but in this case a primate mother and baby. This is more than a coincidence or mere analogy to the similar covers of the above-mentioned volumes - it derives from the fact that Panksepp has extensively investigated the psychobiology of Bowlby’s attachment processes. This perspective underscores the essential contributions of affective neuroscience to a deeper understanding of the fundamental trans-species psychobiological processes that mediate that critical mechanisms of emotional development.

But in addition to developmental psychoanalysis and affective neuroscience, developmental neuroscience, the current derivative of Jackson-Freud’s hierarchical-developmental model, can also offer us essential information for theories of affect and the early development of the unconscious mind. It should be remembered that one of the major findings of neuroscience is that the developing brain, whether animal or human, is qualitatively different from an adult brain (Noebels, 1989; Schore, 1994; Thatcher, Lyon, Rumsey, & Krasnegor, 1996). I point out this obvious fact because it is directly relevant to not only psychoanalytic models of affect, but to one of the fundamental problems of science - how and why a primitive organism first develops, and then continues to become more complex. The central question is, how can development be both discontinuous and continuous?

If it is now clear that an adequate model of early development can not be drawn from psychoanalytic reconstructions of an adult mind, it is also true that a comprehensive neuropsychological model of brain self-organization and reorganization, of plasticity, of how the brain changes with experience, can not be gained by studying only adult normal or abnormal brains. Yet by far, neuroscience, which as Panksepp points out is much more concerned with “cognitive” rather than “affective” neuroscience, has paid little attention to developing brains.

And yet explorations in specifically developmental neuroscience can offer us more detailed information about a spectrum of essential human problems that include constructing more accurate models of the development of the primitive mind, elucidating the gene-environment events that underlie the development of brain systems that process affect, modelling the emergence of various forms of consciousness, describing the experience-dependent maturation of brain systems that foster resilience or high risk to psychopathologies, understanding the ontogenetic progression of primitive into more complex brain-mind-body psychobiological states, and ultimately offering more powerful models of how human relationships can alter, for better or worse, internal affective systems. This overarching perspective necessitates an integration of developmental neuroscience, developmental psychoanalysis, and developmental psychology into models of how and why early experiences are so critical to the evolution of adaptive and maladaptive mechanisms.

In psychoanalysis, Freud’s developmental perspective included an ontogenetic stage theory, a model he incorporated from Jackson (Goldstein, 1995). Although his oral, anal, and phallic model may be somewhat imprecise, the idea that development occurs in stages is supported by current neurobiological research which indicates that the brain matures in stages (Martin et al., 1988; Thatcher, 1991; Schore, 1994). Indeed, Freud’s conviction that the elaboration of what Sulloway (1979) calls his “genetic psychobiology” is a fertile and essential area of scientific inquiry has been confirmed (see Schore, 1994). The centrality of Freud’s developmental perspective is expressed in his statement “from the very first, psychoanalysis was directed towards tracing developmental processes. It...was led...to construct a genetic psychology” (1913, pp. 182-183).
Freud’s ontogenetic perspective was subsequently taken up by others, so much so that developmental models are now a rich point of contact with the other developmental sciences and a central force in psychoanalytic theory and practice (Schore, 1994; 1996; 1997b, c). Interestingly, Freud downplayed the role of the mother in early development, and advanced a model in which the father and later-forming oedipal dynamics were the primary early influence. It was thus Ferenczi who was responsible for advocating formal recognition of the mother’s significance (and an intersubjective approach) into psychoanalysis, a position that lead to Freud’s disavowal of his work (Vida, 1997).

But Freud’s developmental concepts were especially elaborated upon by a number of psychoanalysts who began to explore development not in the reconstructions of adult patients, but in the psychoanalytic observation of infants and children. This rich tradition includes the writings of his daughter Anna, as well as Klein, Winnicott, Bowlby, and Mahler, and continues in the current work of Stern, Emde, Beebe, Fonagy and other developmentally-oriented theoreticians and clinicians. My own contributions to this literature are directed towards demonstrating the direct relevance of developmental psychoanalyis to such theoretical issues as, what are the early origins of the primitive mind and how does the dynamic unconscious self-organize and continue to evolve over the course of the lifespan, and such clinical matters as what are the interpersonal and intrapsychic mechanisms that allow for growth in psychoanalytic treatment? A central tenet of all developmental psychoanalytic models has been the primacy of affect in the first two years of life. As Krystal (1988) has noted, the maturation of affects represents the key event in infancy, and the developmental emergence of the self-regulation of affect is an ontogenetic attainment that is an essential adaptive capacity. \

Indeed, the three most significant advances in psychoanalytic theory since Freud are grounded in developmental affect-transacting phenomena. Object relations theory (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983; Horner, 1991; Scharff & Scharff, 1998) models how early affect-laden experiences with the primary caregiver indelibly influences internal psychic structural (“representational”) systems. Self psychology theory (Kohut, 1971; 1977) details how early affectively-charged interactions between the infant’s emerging self and the mother’s psychobiologically regulating (“selfobject”) functions are critical to the organization of the self. And Bowlby’s (1969; 1973; 1980) attachment theory, which to this date represents the most successful integration of psychoanalysis and the biological sciences, highlights the importance of the infant’s emotional attachment to the mother to the individual’s capacity to enter into all later interpersonal relationships. His concepts now lie at the heart of developmental psychology, which is also now intensively studying the long-enduring effects of early emotional development (e.g., Sroufe, 1996).

It is important to again point out that the affective transactions described by psychoanalytic self psychology, object relations, and attachment theory are occuring during a critical period of neurobiological maturation of the developing limbic system. Anders and Zeanah (1984) put forth the argument that the emotion-generating limbic system is the most obvious site of developmental changes associated with the ascendence of attachment behaviors. Indeed the specific period from 7 to 15 months (roughly Bowlby's period for the establishment of attachment patterns) has been shown to be critical for the myelination and therefore the maturation of particular rapidly developing limbic and cortical association areas (Kinney, Brody, Kloman, & Gilles, 1988; Yakovlev & Lecours, 1967). Psychoanalysis and neuroscience thus strongly fertilize each other in co-creating interdisciplinary models of emotional development (Schore, 1994; 1998a).

If psychoanalysis has been actively incorporating developmental data over the last few decades, contemporary neuroscience has been much slower in the process. It should be pointed out however, that Paul MacLean, one of the pioneer explorers of the limbic system, has concluded that:
One wonders whether the limbic system would ever have become such a ‘solar plexus’ with respect to emotional feelings if it had not been for the development in mammals of the family unit dependent upon the nursing mother (1985, p. 220).

And yet current neuroscientific studies of affect continue to heavily focus on adult brains, despite neurology’s long-standing interest in the effects of early experience on brain development. In 1891, the year of Freud’s On Aphasia, Dareste, using neuroembryological data, formulated the critical period hypothesis, which stated that in the maturing organism developmental processes in different areas proceed at different rates. During these periods of intensified growth and differentiation, the organism is subject to environmental conditions, and if these are outside the normal range a permanent arrest of development occurs. This conception modeled how detrimental early experiences could negatively impact the maturation of the brain, and Freud (1895) incorporated it into his ideas about how early stressful “pathological” environments play a role in adult psychopathology.

In 1894, one year before Freud’s “Project”, Ramon y Cajal (1995) began to describe how enriched epigenetic experiences positively affect neural expression with beneficial psychological outcomes. This line of research continued in studies demonstrating how early "enriched" environments promote brain growth (Rosenzweig, Bennet, & Diamond, 1972), and how the expansion of dendritic growth and synaptogenesis of the postnatally developing brain is "experience-sensitive" (Greenough, 1986) and "experience-dependent" (Aoki & Siekevitz, 1988). In the case of the growth of the emotion-processing limbic system these “experiences” are contained in early maternal-infant contingently-responsive and synchronized psychobiological interactions. And so the most recent expression of this type of work is in current research on the neurobiology of mother-infant relationships. For example, Fleming, O’Day and Kraemer (1999) now describe:

The optimal coordination between the new mammalian mother and her young involves a sequence of behaviors on the part of each that ensures that the young will be adequately cared for and show healthy physical, emotional, and social development. This coordination is accomplished by each member of the relationship having the appropriate sensitivities and responses to cues that characterize the other. (This developmental model)...emphasizes the importance of learning and plasticity in the formation and maintenance of the mother-young relationship and mediation of the experience effects by the brain and its neurochemistry (p. 673).
The next question is, at this point in time can we tell what specific parts of the brain does this early interactive experience impacting? There is now a body of animal and human studies which shows that the infant’s early maturing (Taylor, 1969; Geschwind & Galaburda, 1987; Best, 1988; Hellige, 1993; Schore, 1994; Ornstein, 1997) right hemisphere is specifically impacted by early social experiences (Denenberg, Garbanti, Sherman, Yutzey, & Kaplan, 1978; Schore, 1994). This body of studies is now supported in a recent single photon emission computed tomographic (SPECT) study by Chiron et al. (1997), which indicates that the right brain hemisphere is dominant in human infants.

This suggests that the infant’s developing right brain may require specific forms of experiences that are provided by the mother’s right brain (Rotenberg, 1994; Schore, 1994). In fact, there is now evidence for early right hemisphere-to-right hemisphere communications in very early infancy. Studies now show that most human females show a tendency to cradle infants on the left side of their body (Manning et al., 1997). This behavior is well developed in women but not men, and is independent of handedness. The authors contend that the left-cradling tendency “faciltates the flow of affective information from the infant via the left ear and eye to the center of emotional decoding, that is, the right hemisphere of the mother” (p. 327). Visual cues of affect are important to the maintenance of left cradling, since an image of the baby transmitted to the left side of the mother’s visual field is a necessary stimulus for the preference (Manning & Chamberlain, 1991).

The right cerebral cortex shows a hemispheric advantage in the infant’s processing of individual faces (Deruelle and de Schonen, 1998), in the infant’s recognition of arousal-inducing maternal facial affective expressions (Nelson, 1987), in the infant’s response to the prosody of motherese (Fernald, 1989), and in early language development (Locke, 1997; Schumann, 1997). In describing the greater involvement of the right hemisphere in infancy, Semrud-Clikeman and Hynd (1990, p. 198) state

The emotional experience of the infant develops through the sounds, images, and pictures that constitute much of an infant’s early learning experience, and are disproportionately stored or processed in the right hemisphere during the formative stages of brain ontogeny.

Indeed, the right hemisphere is centrally involved in human attachment and in the development of reciprocal interactions within the mother-infant regulatory system (Schore, 1994; 1996; 1997b; 1998b). In a series of contributions I have offered evidence that face-to-face interactions that generate high levels of positive arousal between the psychobiologically attuned mother and her infant represent an essential mechanism in the development of affect regulation. The interpersonal contexts created in mutual gaze transactions allow for the establishment of “affect synchrony” (Feldman, Greenbaum, & Yirmiya, 1999). In this process of “contingent responsivity” the more the mother tunes her activity level to the infant during periods of social engagement, the more she allows him to recover quietly in periods of disengagement, and the more she attends to the child’s reinitiating cues for reengagement, the more synchronized their interaction.
This mutual regulation of affect occurs in maternal-infant play experiences. In such positively charged transactions, the infant’s right hemisphere, which is dominant for the infant's recognition of the maternal face, and for the perception of arousal-inducing maternal facial affective expressions, visual emotional information, and the prosody of the mother’s voice, is appraising the output of the mother’s right hemisphere, which is dominant for nonverbal communication and the processing and expression of emotional information (see Schore, 1994). The maternal comforting substrate is also located in the mother’s right brain (Horton, 1995). The fact that connections into the autonomic nervous system are highly lateralized to the right brain (Schore, 1994; 1997b) may explain Basch’s (1976, p. 766) contention that “the language of mother and infant consist of signals produced by the autonomic, involuntary nervous system in both parties.”
Trevarthen (1990, p. 357) notes, “the intrinsic regulators of human brain growth in a child are specifically adapted to be coupled, by emotional communication, to the regulators of adult brains”. In these affective interchanges, the mother maximizes positive and minimizes negative affect states in the infant, and they culminate in the development of an attachment system, the function of which is the dyadic regulation of emotion (Sroufe, 1996). The mother is thus a regulator of arousal (van der Kolk & Fisler, 1994), and the transfer of affect between mother and infant are thus mediated by right hemisphere-to-right hemisphere arousal regulating transactions. Confirming this model, Ryan, Kuhl, and Deci (1997, p. 719), using EEG and neuroimaging data, now propose that “The positive emotional exchange resulting from autonomy-supportive parenting involves participation of right hemispheric cortical and subcortical systems that participate in global, tonic emotional modulation.”
These events are inscribed in implicit-procedural memory in the early developing right hemisphere that is specialized for the processing of visuospatial information (Galin, 1974) and “implicit” learning (Hugdahl, 1995). This model fits nicely with the clinical psychoanalytic observations that early mental representations are specifically visually-oriented (Giovacchini, 1981), and that historical visual imagery may be derivative of events of early phases of development (Anthi, 1983).
Attachment dynamics continue to be expressed in ongoing emotional development, and the right cortex plays a crucial role in the processing of affectively salient visual and auditory information emanating from the human face throughout the lifespan. In optimal early environments the right hemisphere, the lateralized substrate of early socioemotional learning and attachment processes, ends its growth phase in the second year, when the linear left hemisphere begins one, but it cycles back into growth phases at later periods of the life cycle (Thatcher, 1994). This allows for the continuity of attachment mechanisms in subsequent functioning, and yet also for the potential continuing reorganization of the emotion-processing right brain throughout life.

Right brain processing of socioemotional information and right mind-body connections
Although most neuroscientists would define the experimental activity of their discipline as “brain research,” a term that implies investigations of a singular natural system, there is a long tradition in the neurological sciences of the concept of dual lateralized brain systems (Harrington, 1985). In the nineteenth century, the golden age of neurology, Broca’s (1861) discovery that left hemisphere lesions often result in linguistic loss was later matched by Jackson’s findings that the right hemisphere supports emotional speech and mediates preverbal mentation and automatic emotional functions which are subsequently arranged in words in the left hemisphere into a propositional form (1931).
The resulting asymmetries of the hemispheres was then translated into models of dominance, and “around 1900...there arose the view that the left cerebral hemisphere was dominant for all higher functions” (Bogen, 1997). Freud’s (1923) contention that the ego is located in cortex in the “speech-area on the left-hand side” (p. 26) was undoubtedly influenced by these trends on lateralization within neurological science. But in addition, it may reflect the hemispheric bias of Freud’s own brain. It has been pointed out that his development of “an uncompromising oral and auditory psychotherapy” may reflect the fact that, within Freud, “the subtle cortical organization of the minor cerebral hemisphere (his ‘right brain’) was less highly developed than that of the major” (Cheshire, 1996, p. 1160).
Over the course of this century the body of evidence for lateralization of the human hemispheres has become massive, and it is currently accepted that the right hemisphere is specialized for more nonlinear, holistic, analogical processing while the left is specialized for linear, analytic processing (Van Kleek, 1989), that the right uses an expansive attention mechanism that focuses on global features while the left uses a restricted mode that focuses on local detail (Derryberry & Tucker, 1994), and that the hemispheres use two types of image generation (Kosslyn et al., 1995). The laterality research from the split brain studies of the 1970’s has been cited by both psychoanalytic (Galin, 1974) and neuroscience (Joseph, 1996) authors to demonstrate the similarities of right hemispheric cognition with Freud’s primary process and left with secondary process cognition.
But very recent advances in laterality research may be even more relevant to psychoanalysis. These studies are going beyond investigating the hemispheric processing of cognitive information to the right hemispheric processing of affective information (Silberman & Weingartner, 1986) at unconscious levels (Wexler, Warrenburg, Schwartz, & Janer, 1992). This hemisphere is dominant both for the perception of nonverbal emotional expressions embedded in facial and prosodic stimuli (Blonder, Bowers, & Heilman, 1991) and for implicit learning (Hugdahl, 1995). In current experimental studies there is intense interest in the implicit perception of affective information transmitted by faces (Niedenthal, 1990), and in the distinct dynamic properties of “nonconscious” affect, which is relatively diffuse, more readily displaced, and yields stronger or less adulterated effect (Murphy, Monahan, & Zajonc, 1995).
This “automatic emotion” operates in infancy and beyond at nonconscious levels (Hansen & Hansen, 1994), and such early automatic reactions shape the subsequent conscious emotional processing of a stimulus (Dimberg & Ohman, 1996). Because the unconscious processing of emotional information is extremely rapid, the dynamic operations of the “transmission of nonconscious affect” (Murphy et al., 1995, p. 600) and the spontaneous communication of “automatic emotion” can not be consciously perceived. These processes are fast acting, since the implicit appraisal of facially expressed emotional cues is initiated in as little as 2 milliseconds (Niedenthal, 1990), far beneath levels of awareness (Schore, in press, a).
But the right hemisphere is also centrally involved in not just the reception but the expression of affective states. Right cortical functions mediate the expression of facial displays of emotion (Borod, Haywood, & Koff, 1997), thereby facilitating “spontaneous emotional communication” (Buck, 1994) and “spontaneous” gestural communication (Blonder et al., 1995). These rapid communications are not only sensed by another face, they trigger motor responses in the facial musculature of the recipient. These studies are thus describing the lateralized neurobiological substrate of “primitive emotional contagion” (Hatfield et al., 1992). This process describes the unconscious, automatic, and uncontrollable tendency to mimic and synchronize another person’s facial expression, postures, movements, and vocalizations, thereby allowing for the interpersonal modulation of emotions.
For example, studies of emotion communication now demonstrate that human vocal affect expressions elicit electromyographically detectable changes in the receiver’s facial affect expressions (Hietanen, Surakka, & Linnankoski, 1998). Even more than this, the perceiver mimics the perceived expression within 300-400 milliseconds, at levels beneath awareness (Stenberg, Wiking, & Dahl, 1998). In discussing how a perceiver rapidly mimics the facial gestures of faces Bruner concludes:
a quick-triggered mimetic reaction might not only facilitate affective bonding with a putative partner, but could also send reafferent signals back into the systems to assure arousal-appropriate perceptual processing of that partner (Bruner, 1994, p. 278, my italics).
Note that this description also mirrors my earlier characterization of the right brain-to-right brain affective bonding mechanism embedded within the infant-maternal attachment relationship. It also fits well with the documented role of the right hemisphere in mediating facial expressivity during spontaneous social interactions that take place in the “natural conversation” of “interpersonal family communication” (Blonder, Burns, Bowers, Moore, & Heilman, 1993).
Right brain-to-right brain psychophysiological processes also explicate Dimberg and Ohman’s (1996) assertion that
...long sequences of interactions between people may be partly determined by nonconscious perceptions and automatic responses on the part of both the sender and receiver. Their conscious understanding of what is going on in the interaction that they can formulate verbally, on the other hand, may be quite independent of this basic level of interaction (p. 177).
Indeed, these authors specifically implicate right hemispheric processes in these events. Note how this characterization also describes the nonverbal unconscious right brain-to-right communications within the psychoanalytic transference-countertransference relationship (see Schore, 1994; 1997c; in press, a).
In addition, very current neuroscience data indicates that hemispheric asymmetry is not just a human characteristic, but also extends down to mammals, (Adamec, 1997), fishes, reptiles, amphibians (Bisazza, Rogers, & Vallortigara, 1998), and birds (Vallortigara, 1992). Furthermore, although earlier thinking considered only lateralization at the cortical hemispheric level, there is now considerable support for right vs. left lateralization of the human subcortical structures that mediate affective phenomena. Right lateralized components of emotional and facial processing are seen in, for example, the human right amygdala (Cahill et al., 1996; Morris, Ohman, & Dolan, 1999), right insula (Berthier, Starkstein, & Leiguarda, 1987); right basal ganglia (Cohen, Riccio, & Flannery, 1994), and right thalamus (Woodman & Tabatabai, 1998).
One of the most important aspects of the relationship between asymmetrical subcortical structures and affective functions is the lateralization of right brain connections into the reticular formation that supports the fundamental brain arousal mechanisms (see Schore, 1994). According to Solms (1996) arousal processes, which have their epicenter in the ascending reticular activating system, represent the physiological correlates of those mental processes conceptualized by Freud as “psychical energy”.