Lecture:
“The Right Brain and the Origin of Human Nature: Working With Conscious and Unconscious Emotion in Psychotherapy”

Conference Description:
The capstone of three decades of work, Affect Regulation and the Origin of Human Nature details how the early developing right brain – the psychobiological locus of Freud’s unconscious mind – plays a central role in the origin of human nature, defined as the general characteristics and feelings attributed to human beings. Over the lifespan, at implicit levels beneath awareness, the early evolving right brain unconsciously generates the emotional capacity for both love and hate, ecstasy and agony, good and evil, forgiveness and revenge, creativity and destructiveness – all products of the deeper stratum of human nature.

In this PowerPoint lecture I offer recent brain laterality research indicating that rapid right brain emotional and relational implicit processes operate at unconscious levels not only in early attachment development but in psychotherapy. I present a neurobiologically informed clinical model for working with unconscious and conscious emotion in right brain psychotherapy, in which synchronized interactively regulated nonverbal emotional dynamics act as therapeutic change mechanisms that focus not on conscious verbal insight but on the formation of an unconscious right brain-to-right brain communicating bond implicitly embedded within the burgeoning therapeutic relationship.