Right Brain-to-Right Brain Psychotherapy: Recent Clinical and Scientific Advances

Abstract

In my ongoing studies I continue to suggest that the mental health field is currently experiencing a paradigm shift, in large part due to the integration of neuroscience within updated models of clinical treatment (see Schore, 2003b, 2012, 2019a). Indeed, neuroscience as a whole is now in a rapid period of growth, due both to advances in technology and to its expanding connections with other scientific and clinical disciplines. This expansion is being fueled by the rediscovery of brain lateralization, first established in the nineteenth century at the dawn of modern neurology, and the recent discoveries of the different structural and functional organizations of the right and left brains, the unconscious and conscious minds. My clinical and theoretical models represent ongoing investigations of the right brain and its adaptive bodily-based emotional, relational, and survival processes. With respect to the origins of these two lateralized self systems a large body of research indicates an earlier maturation of the emotional imagistic right brain than the analytic linguistic left brain (see Schore, 1994, 2012, 2003a,b, 2019a,b). Clinical and neuropsychoanalytic studies support Sigmund Freud’s (1923) classic formulation that the unconscious mind develops before the conscious mind, and that “thinking in pictures...approximates more closely to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and it is unquestionably older than the latter both