The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy: Healing the Social Brain (Second Edition) (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology)

A look at the seven emotional systems of the brain by the researcher who discovered them.

What makes us happy? What makes us sad? How do we come to feel a sense of enthusiasm? What fills us with lust, anger, fear, or tenderness? Traditional behavioral and cognitive neuroscience have yet to provide satisfactory answers. The Archaeology of Mind presents an affective neuroscience approach—which takes into consideration basic mental processes, brain functions, and emotional behaviors that all mammals share—to locate the neural mechanisms of emotional expression. It reveals—for the first time—the deep neural sources of our values and basic emotional feelings.

This book elaborates on the seven emotional systems that explain how we live and behave. These systems originate in deep areas of the brain that are remarkably similar across all mammalian species. When they are disrupted, we find the origins of emotional disorders:

- SEEKING: how the brain generates a euphoric and expectant response

- FEAR: how the brain responds to the threat of physical danger and death

- RAGE: sources of irritation and fury in the brain

- LUST: how sexual desire and attachments are elaborated in the brain

- CARE: sources of maternal nurturance

- GRIEF: sources of non-sexual attachments

- PLAY: how the brain generates joyous, rough-and-tumble interactions

- SELF: a hypothesis explaining how affects might be elaborated in the brain

The book offers an evidence-based evolutionary taxonomy of emotions and affects and, as such, a brand-new clinical paradigm for treating psychiatric disorders in clinical practice.

The latest work from a pioneer in the study of the development of the self.

As in the first two volumes of this series, each chapter represents a further development of the theory at a particular point in time, presented in chronological order. Some of the earlier chapters have been re-edited: those more recent contain a good deal of new material that has not been previously published.

The first part of the book, Affect Regulation Therapy and Clinical Neuropsychoanalysis, contains chapters on the art of the craft, offering interpersonal neurobiological models of the change mechanism in the treatment of all patients, but especially in patients with a history of early relational trauma. These chapters contain contributions on “modern attachment theory” and its focus on the essential nonverbal, unconscious affective mechanisms that lie beneath the words of the patient and therapist; on clinical neuropsychoanalytic models of working with relational trauma and pathological dissociation: and on the use of affect regulation therapy (ART) in the emotionally stressful, heightened affective moments of clinical enactments.

The chapters in the second part of the book on Developmental Affective Neuroscience and Developmental Neuropsychiatry address the science that underlies regulation theory’s clinical models of development and psychopathogenesis. Although most mental health practitioners are actively involved in child, adolescent, and adult psychotherapeutic treatment, a major theme of the latter chapters is that the field now needs to more seriously attend to the problem of early intervention and prevention.

Praise for Allan N. Schore:

"Allan Schore reveals himself as a polymath, the depth and breadth of whose reading–bringing together neurobiology, developmental neurochemistry, behavioral neurology, evolutionary biology, developmental psychoanalysis, and infant psychiatry–is staggering." –British Journal of Psychiatry

"Allan Schore's...work is leading to an integrated evidence-based dynamic theory of human development that will engender a rapproachement between psychiatry and neural sciences."–American Journal of Psychiatry

"One cannot over-emphasize the significance of Schore's monumental creative labor...Oliver Sacks' work has made a great deal of difference to neurology, but Schore's is perhaps even more revolutionary and pivotal...His labors are Darwinian in scope and import."–Contemporary Psychoanalysis

"Schore's model explicates in exemplary detail the precise mechanisms in which the infant brain might internalize and structuralize the affect-regulating functions of the mother, in circumscribed neural tissues, at specifiable points in it epigenetic history." –Journal of the American Psychoanalytic

"Allan Schore has become a heroic figure among many psychotherapists for his massive reviews of neuroscience that center on the patient-therapist relationship." –Daniel Goleman, author of Social Intelligence

• the role of the fight/flight/freeze response in traumatic stress
• the neurophysiology of traumatic stress and dissociation
• the Whiplash Syndrome as a model for procedural memory in trauma
• analysis of traumatic repetition
• the theoretical concept of somatic dissociation
• the varied syndromes and medical diseases of trauma and dissociation
• a theoretical analysis or therapy for trauma
• illustrative case histories of trauma and the body
• and more!