Schore/ar/chapter 4

ADVANCES IN NEUROPSYCHOANALYSIS, ATTACHMENT THEORY, AND TRAUMA RESEARCH:  IMPLICATIONS FOR SELF PSYCHOLOGY

internal homeostatic equilibrium (p 110, see also p 115)

P 109 –

“In particular, I articulate a model of the self psychology and neurobiology of infant trauma and the etiology of posttraumatic stress disorder and borderline states. (schore/ar/109)”

Kohut – “developmental construct of selfobject…. Self psychology is built upon a fundamental developmental principle – that parents with mature psychological organizations serve as selfobjects that perform critical regulatory functions for the infant who possesses an immature, incomplete psychological organization.  The child is thus provided, at nonverbal levels beneath conscious awareness, with selfobject experiences that directly effect the vitalization and structural cohesion of the self.  (schore/ar/109)”

1-4-7

dependency – Because from birth there was no one to help me regulate my emotions I had to find a way to do it alone by myself.  I was forced to be too independent at way too early an age.  My needs were unmet and they still are – it makes me needy.  The needs were and still are about attachment.  That is where I struggle most.  In and with relationships – in and with socioemotional situations.

P 110 –

Others as objects [I don’t buy this – need to find the new research that different parts of the brain process info about objects and people]

Others that are needed so that an infant can organize a self are “technically described as objects” (quoting Wolf, 1988, p 11.) in (schore/ar/110)”

++ 1.  Mother-infant pair as self-selfobject pair

++ 2.  “…the infant’s dyadic reciprocal regulatory transactions with selfobjects allows for the maintenance of his/her internal homeostatic equilibrium.  These regulating self-selfobject experiences provide the particular intersubjective affect experiences that evoke the emergence and maintenance of the self (Kohut, 1984). in (Schore/ar/110)”

“Regulation thus occupies the intellectual core of Kohut’s model, just as it does in the works of Freud (quotes a bunch of folks) in (schore/ar/110)”

p. 111 –

“selfobject function is internalized by the infant and psychological regulatory structures are formed…. The essential experience and definition of the self are built out of internalized selfobject functions that allow for the emergence of more complex psychological regulatory structures.  (schore/ar/111)”

“psychobiology of the self”

”When self psychology, like psychoanalysis in general, discards the biological realm of the body – when it overemphasizes the cognitive and verbal realms – it commits Descartes’s error, “the separation of the most refined operations of mind from the structure and operation of a biological organism: (Damasio, 1994, p. 250).  Dalmasio described the essential adaptive function of the brain:  “The overall function of the brain is to be well informed about what goes on in the rest of the body, the body proper; about what goes on in itself; and about the environment surrounding the organism, so that suitable survivable occommodations can be achieved between the organism and the environment: (1994, p. 90).  Indeed, according to Damasio, the self is a “repeatedly reconstructed biological state” that “endows our experience with subjectivity.”  (schore/ar/111)”

“Current neuroscience is now intensely interested in “the synaptic self,” especially the nonconscious “implicit self” (LeDoux, 2002), and in “self-representation in neural systems,” representations that “coordinate inner body signals to generate survival-appropriate inner regulation” that allow the organism “to act as a coherent whole” (Churchland, 2002, p. 310).  The biological organism, the body, must be brought into the core of self psychology. (schore/ar/111)

p. 112 –

“Kohut proposed that a defective self and an impaired regulatory structure lie at the foundation of early-forming psychopathologies.,,,,”establish narcissistic equilibrium” (Kohut, 1971, p. 65)….more current writers in self psychology have affirmed that affect dysregulation is a central principle of psychopathogenesis.  (schore/ar/112)”

“… experiences with a traumatizing caregiver negatively ipact the child’s attachment security, right brain maturation, and sense of self…. Relational trauma and dissociation are common elements of the histories of borderline personality disorders…. (schore/ar/112)”

DEVELOPMENT:  REGULATED AFFECTIVE COMUNICATIONS, SELF-SELF-OBJECT INTERACTIONS, AND THE DYADIC GENESIS OF A SECURE ATTACHMENT

p. 113 –

“…early attachment experiences indelibly affect the trajectory of the self over the course of the lifespan.  (schore/ar/113)”

“The essential task of the first year of human life is the creation of a secure attachment bond of emotional communication between the infant and primary caregiver.  Developmental researchers of infant-mother mutual gaze transactions have observed:  “Face-to-face interac- (schore/ar/113) tions, emerging at approximately 2 months of age, are highly arousing, affect-laden, short interpersonal events that expose infants to high levels of cognitive and social information.  To regulate the high positive arousal, mothers and infants…synchronize the intensity of their affect bhavior within lags of split secons”  (Feldman, Greenbam, & Yirmiya, 1999, p. 223). (Schore/ar/114)”

p.114 –

this is first “social play” – Trevarthen (1993) termed “primary intersubjectivity” – “patterned by an infant-leads-mother-follows sequence….communicational matrix….In such synchronized contexts of “mutually attuned selective cueing,” the infant learns to send specific social cues to which the mother has responded, thereby reflecting “an anticipatory sense of response of the other to the self, concomitant with an accommodation of the self to the other” (Bergman, 1999, p. 96).  L(Schore/ar/114)”

each partner learns the other’s rhythmic structure and modifies his/her behavior “to fit that structure” quoting lester, hoffman, and brazelton, 1985, p. 24   “In order to enter into this synchronized communication, the mother must be psychobiologically attuned not so much to the child’s overt behavior as to the reflections of the rhythms of his/her internal state.  These are critical events, because they represent a fundamental opportunity to practice the interpersonal synchronization of biological rhythms (Nishihara, Horiuchi….et al, 2002).  And so, in these exchanges of affect synchrony, as the mother and infant match each other’s temporal and affective patterns, each recreates an inner psychophysiological state similar to the partner’s.  (schore/ar/114)”

“In such positively charged heightened affective moments, not only the tempo of their engagement but also of their disengagement and reengagement is coordinated.  The more the psychobiologically attuned mother tunes her activity level to the infant during periods of social engagement, the more she allows him/her to recover quietly in periods of disengagement, and the more she attends to the child’s reinitiating cues for reengagement, the more synchronized their interaction.  These mutually attuned synchronized interactions are fundamental to the healthy affective development of the infant.  L(J.R. Schore, 2003).  (schore/ar/114)”

These moments are literally and functionally creating brain pathways as the nerves of the brain are being organized/moved around and trained to operate in these certain essential ways.

p. 115 –

“organism’s genetically encoded endogenous rhythms”

“the transfer of emotional information is thus intensified in resonant contexts.  This means that the resonating caregiver does more than reflect back the infant’s state.  Rather, in cocreating a context of intersubjective resonance, her role as a “biological mirror” (Papousek & Papousek, 1979) is more precisely described as an “amplifying mirror” (Schore, 1994) in (schore/ar/115)”

ruptures of the attachment bond

“The disruption of attachment bonds in infancy leads to a regulatory failure and an “impaired autonomic homeostasis” (Reite & Capitanio, 1985)…..the parental selfobject acts to “remedy the child’s homeostatic imbalance.” [Kohut, 1977] [gives no page ref] …(schore/ar/115)

speaks of good enough caregiver with no ref to Bettelheim

ATTACHMENT

“The dual regulatory processes of affect synchrony that creates states of positive arousal and interactive repair that modulates states of negative arousal are the fundamental building blocks of attachment and its associated emotions.  They also allow for the maximization of the communication of emotional states within an intimate dyad, and represents the psychobiological underpinning of empathy …. (schore/ar/115)”  [copied into schore ar postnotes attachment)

vitalization:  “interactive regulation of positive affect”

soothing:  “interactive regulation of negative affect”  (schore/ar/115)

“…now defined as the interactive regulation of states of biological synchronicity between organisms (quotes a bunch of his work here)” (schore/ar/115)

p. 116 –

ATTACHMENT

“Through the mechanism of the dyadic regulation of emotion, the baby becomes attached to the resulting caregiver who expands opportunities for positive and minimizes negative affective states. (schore/ar/116)”  [copied into schore ar postnotes attachment)

(Lichtenberg,Lathmann, & Fosshage 1992, p. 162)  “Regulation of state lies at the heart of our theory.  In infancy … success in regulating smoothness of transitions between states is a principal indicatory of the organization and stability of the emergent and core self as well as caregiver success”  (add more quote marks as this is all quoted in schore/ar/116)

STRUCTURALIZATION:  SELFOBJECT AND ATTACHMENT DYNAMICS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RIGHT BRAIN

“Kohut described a core or “nuclear self,” an early-developing structure that is the basis for “our experience that our body and mind form a unity in space and a continuum in time” and that “forms the central sector of the personality” (1997, p. 178; italics added).  Indeed, Kohut’s colleague Basch contended that the formation of self-organization is “the supraordinate ordering principle of human life” (1983, p. 41).  (schore/ar/116)”

This is what I DID NOT HAVE:  our body and mind form a unity in space and a continuum in time

“…why do intersubjective emotional communications play such a central role in the evolution of the brain-based core self?  (Schore/ar/116)”

“Over the course of a number of works I have suggested that attachment represents synchronized dyadic bioenergetic transmissions (1994), that resonant emotional transactions involve synchronized and ordered directed flows of energy in the infant’s and mother’s brains (2000e), that the attachment dynamic involves the right brain regulation of biological synchronicity between organisms (2000a), and that the developing self-system is located in the early-maturing right hemisphere (1994, 2001b).  (schore/ar/117)”

“…early emotional development and self-development are inextricably intertwined.  (schore/ar/117)” (quoting himself, 1994)

“…in the current work of LeDoux (2000)…,

Because emotion systems coordinate learning, the broader the range of emotions that a child experiences the broader will be the emotional range of the self that develops …. And because more brain systems are typically active during emotional than during nonemotional states, and the intensity of arousal is greater, the opportunity for coordinated learning across brain systems is greater during emotional states.  By coordinating parallel plasticity throughout the brain, emotional states promote the development and unification of the self.  (p. 322)

(schore./ar.117)”

I would think there would be a difference, though, between emotion as positive arousal and emotion as negative arousal as far as learning, with the latter causing interference??

++++

EMPATHY

“It is important to emphasize that empathic communications within the therapeutic alliance are not voluntary.  The therapist is not “doing something” as much as “learning to be with the patient,” not matching or imitating overt behavior but resonating with the external expressions of the patient’s inner states.  (schoe/ar/143)”

“Neuropsychological and developmental studies of fast-acting nonverbal interpersonal processes that occur at levels beneath conscious awareness indicated that empathic phenomena involve more than receptive functions.  Rather, the nonconscious face-to-face communication of affective states is dyadic, bi-directional, reciprocal, dyanimic, and mutually amplifying, a facial feedback loop with both sensory receptive and motor expressive components.  Social psychological and psychophysiological researchers are thus investigating not only empathy, the capacity to recognize the emotional states of another, but also emotional contagion, the ability to organize an affective state that matches the other’s emotional display (Cappella, 19999; Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1992; Lundqvist & Dimberg, 1995) (schore/ar/143)”

“Recall, the right hemisphere recognizes an emotion from a visually presented facial expression and then generates a somatosensory, bodily-based representation of how another feels when displaying that certain facial expression (Adolphs et al., 2000).  (schore/ar/144)”

++++

“… the documented finding that almost half of the patients seen by psychoanalysts have a personality disorder, with borderline personality disorder the most common and severe (Doidge, Simon, Gillies, & Ruskin, 1994; Friedman, Bucci, Christian, Drucker, & Garrison, 1998)…. (schore/ar/148)”