9 DISSOCIATION NOTES

10-16-6

copied from schore chp 1

p 21 – orbitofrontal system –

++  “thinking part of emotional brain”

++  major role in internal state of organism

++  temporal organization of behavior

++  appraisal & adjustment or correction of emotional responses = affect regulation

++  “acts as recovery mechanism that efficiently monitors and autoregulates the duration, frequency, and intensity of not only positive but also negative affect states.  This allows for a self-comforting capacity that can modulate distressing psychobiological states and reestablish positively toned states.  The essential activity of this psychic system is thus the adaptive switching of internal bodily states in response to changes in the external environment that are appraised to be personally meaningful.  This emergent function, in turn, enables the individual to recover from disruptions of state and to integrate a sense of self across transitions of state, thereby allowing for a continuity of experience in various environmental contexts.  These capacities are critical to the emergence, at 18 months, of a self-system that is both stable and adaptable, a working definition of a dynamic system (lewis, 1995).  (Schore/ar/21)”

“Infant observers report the emergence, at 18 months, of a “reflective self” that can take into account one’s own and others’ mental states (Fonagy, Steele, Steele, Moran, & Higgitt, 1991).  In the course of the second year the infant acquires (schore/ar/21) the capacity to generate a “theory of mind” in which an individual imputes mental states to self and to others and predicts behavior on the basis of such states (Bretherton, McNew, & Beeghly, 1981).  The orbital cortex matures in the middle of the second year…a time when the average child has a vocabulary of 15 words.  The core of the self is thus nonverbal and unconscious, and it lies in patterns of affect regulation.  (Schore/ar/22)”