There is only one person alive who deeply understands the linkages between modern neuroscience, the unconscious mind, and clinical psychology with the academic and practical depth required to effectively teach them to the world. That person is Dr. Allan Schore. The Right Brain and the Origin of Human Nature brings forward that understanding so we can all think, feel, and act with more clarity and compassion about who we are and how we can evolve―as individuals, in relationships, and as a species.

Andrew D. Huberman, PhD

Stanford University School of Medicine

The Right Brain and the Origin of Human Nature is the culmination of Allan Schore’s pioneering three-decade exploration of the unconscious mind and brain asymmetry. Blending neuroscience, attachment theory, and psychotherapy, Schore invites both clinicians and curious readers into a compelling inquiry of how the right brain shapes our emotional lives, relationships, and sense of self. His integrative approach highlights the vital interplay of cortical and subcortical systems, conscious and unconscious processes, and left–right brain dynamics that underlie our human experience.

Stephen W. Porges, PhD

creator of Polyvagal Theory

Allan Schore deserves to be congratulated for his important work over many decades on the crucial role played by the right hemisphere in affect regulation. This ‘capstone’ volume reviews, expands, and consolidates the evidence for the central place of right hemisphere to right hemisphere communication in the development of healthy human beings and a healthy society, and why it is of critical importance to each of us in the world we live in now.

Iain McGilchrist, BM, MA, FRCPsych

author of The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things

In this latest triumphant tour de force, Allan Schore once again ventures into uncharted territory―a realm in which the enduring wisdom of what it means to be human intersects with the empirical rigor of affective neuroscience and the energetic resonance of the relational fabric that binds us all. A world-renowned, universally revered neuroscientist–clinician–scholar, Schore’s ongoing evidence-based and holistic exploration of the convergence of right brain implicit processes, attachment theory, trauma research, the collective unconscious, and spiritual interconnectedness is gradually unveiling the origin of our shared humanity, firmly establishing him as the undisputed father of affective, relational, and spiritual neuroscience.

Martha Stark, MD

clinical faculty, Harvard Medical School, and award-winning author of Relentless Hope: The Refusal to Grieve and Modes of Therapeutic Action

Allan Schore offers a compelling foundation for understanding the processes that shape intersubjectivity, affect regulation, and human development. Grounded in decades of clinical and neuroscientific research, this stimulating account resonates with contemporary work about the neurobiological basis of interpersonal dynamics, bridging brain science, mental health, and human relationships.

Guillaume Dumas, PhD

associate professor of computational psychiatry, Université de Montréal

Allan Schore has done it again! In yet another masterpiece, he’s brought his love of the right brain and impeccable scholarship into what is inarguably his most comprehensive volume to date. The Right Brain and the Origin of Human Nature uses the totality of Schore’s research to present the highs and lows of being human within mind–body–brain development, relationships, psychotherapy, and culture at large. This book is destined to be a classic.

Terry Marks-Tarlow, PhD

author of Clinical Intuition in Psychotherapy and Awakening Clinical Intuition, Mythic Imagination Today

Henri Ellenberger’s The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970) traced psychiatry’s evolving attempts to map the unseen: Mesmer’s animal magnetism, Charcot’s hypnosis, Freud’s drives, Janet’s dissociations. Allan Schore’s The Right Brain and the Origin of Human Nature extends that lineage into our century with a radical reformulation: the unconscious is not a repository of repressed wishes but a right-lateralised, embodied, relational system born from the preverbal rhythms of infant–caregiver attunement… Schore’s contribution thus reframes psychiatry’s oldest question, what it means to be human, in developmental and relational terms. If Freud’s metapsychology was organised around instinctual drives, Schore’s meta-neurobiology is organised around dyadic regulation. In the lineage from Freud to Bowlby to Schore, the once buried unconscious has completed its migration, from the hidden recesses of drive to the lived textures of human relationships.

George Halasz

Review in The British Journal of Psychiatry