The role of co-regulated reciprocal regressions in depth psychotherapy
Unique on the international scene, Allan Schore (Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles; he teaches and conducts research at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA; recipient of the Scientific Research Award from Division 39 of the American Psychological Association) has, over decades of passionate interdisciplinary research, integrated attachment theory, interpersonal neurobiology and affective neuroscience with psychoanalytic and dynamic theories. Through this integration, he has shown how personality and the individual—both in healthy, integrated development and in psychopathology—are shaped precisely by the earliest neuro-psycho-biological and affective connections between caregiver and child, beginning with unconscious (i.e. non-aware) communication governed by care and love, or conversely by trauma and deprivation, between the right hemisphere of one person in connection with the right hemisphere of the other.
From early relational trauma to affect regulation theory, Schore has demonstrated how, in clinical practice as well as in significant relationships, through a continuous unconscious exchange (neurobiologically grounded and traceable in neuroscientific terms), the two subjects in relationship constantly reactivate unconscious dynamics rooted in internal working models originally encoded at the level of implicit memory, based on self–other interpersonal representations formed in relationship. These representations constituted the foundations of the child’s self-esteem and self-image, influencing development from the first two years of life—crucial for the growth and maturation of the right hemisphere, which in the adult continues to govern emotional and affective processing and the global meaning of experience. The right hemisphere is the first to develop, up to the first year and a half of life, after which it gives way to the predominance of the left hemisphere, which becomes dominant after the second year of life.
From his first volume ever translated into Italian, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self (1994)—the product of ten years of interdisciplinary research and a landmark in Infant Research, neurobiological science and psychoanalysis—to the two recent volumes published by Norton in 2019 (Right Brain Psychotherapy and The Development of the Unconscious Mind, not yet translated into Italian), and through the three cornerstones of theory and clinical practice (La regolazione degli affetti e la riparazione del sé, I disturbi del sé—both published in Italy by Astrolabio—and La scienza e l’arte della psicoterapia, ISC Editore), Schore offers in the present seminar a very recent theoretical-clinical application of his extraordinary work. Starting from enactment and the unconscious repetitions reactivated in therapy, he arrives at the possibility of affect regulation—through relationally induced and controlled regressions—during appropriate windows of right-hemisphere-to-right-hemisphere communication, thereby regulating dissociated and dysregulated traumatic states and making integration, emotional regulation and affective growth possible.
Clara Mucci, Full Professor of Dynamic Psychology at the University of Bergamo. After completing a PhD in the United States in psychoanalysis, English literature (Shakespeare) and anthropology at Emory University (Atlanta), and after becoming a full professor of English literature, she obtained a degree in clinical psychology, specialising at the SIPP (Italian Society for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy), and further trained abroad as a Fellow at the Personality Studies Institute in New York directed by Otto Kernberg and at the Weill Cornell Presbyterian Hospital in White Plains, New York.
She subsequently completed first-level training in MBT (Mentalization-Based Treatment) for the treatment of personality disorders at University College London, in a programme directed by Peter Fonagy and Anthony Bateman. She also obtained certification to conduct the Adult Attachment Interview (under the guidance of Deborah Jakobvitz and Nino Dazzi, instructors of the school directed by Mary Main and Erik Hesse at the University of California, Berkeley), and certification in the assessment of Reflective Functioning—a method for evaluating the construct of mentalization—under the guidance of Howard Steele at The New School, New York, where she was also a visiting scholar in 2018.
Author of numerous monographs on psychoanalytic theory, women’s writing and Shakespeare (e.g. A memoria di donna, Carocci; Il teatro delle streghe, Liguori; Tempeste, Liguori, among others), she is also well known internationally for her volumes on trauma (Beyond Individual and Collective Trauma, Karnac, now Routledge; translated into Italian by Cortina as Trauma e perdono) and Borderline Bodies (translated by Cortina as Corpi borderline in 2020).
In her clinical approach—based on trauma, attachment and neuroscience (drawing especially on Allan Schore’s contribution) and focused on the treatment of personality disorders—she not only offers a re-examination of Sándor Ferenczi’s writings, but also presents an integrated method for understanding, treating and caring for patients who have survived severe traumatization, from attachment trauma to massive social traumatizations such as the Shoah. This method is grounded in psychoanalytic, neuroscientific, and interpersonal and intergenerational neurobiological theory and clinical research.
