About This Masterclass
In this four-hour Masterclass, Allan moved into the clinical application of his work, taking clinicians deeper into how affect regulation, right-brain communication and the body work moment to moment in therapy.
Allan divided the session into two teaching modules:
- The Right Brain and The Origin of Human Nature: Working With Unconscious and Conscious Emotion in Psychotherapy
- Right Brain Psychotherapy: Working With Attachment Trauma
The session slowed down and looked closely at the implicit, nonverbal level of the therapeutic relationship: how a clinician reads and responds to a patient’s shifting affective and bodily states, how dysregulation is met and repaired, and how the therapist’s own right brain and nervous system become part of the clinical dialogue.
Drawing on the parallel between the early caregiver-infant relationship and the relationship between therapist and patient, Allan showed how change comes through the affective, relational encounter itself, not through insight, interpretation or conscious reflection alone. He taught through the close analysis of clinical case material.
Key questions included:
- How can clinicians recognise implicit, nonverbal communication in the therapeutic relationship?
- How do tone, timing, bodily state, gaze and shifts in affect carry clinically important information?
- How does the early caregiver and infant relationship serve as a template for the regulating work of therapy?
- How can the therapist help regulate and repair dysregulation in the room?
- How can the therapist read their own bodily and emotional responses as information about the patient’s non-conscious states?
- How does right-brain-to-right-brain communication shape the therapeutic relationship?
- Why might heightened affective moments, rather than moments of insight, be central to therapeutic change?
The session explored:
- Implicit affect regulation in clinical practice
- Right-brain-to-right-brain communication, and why the relationship itself carries the change
- The caregiver and infant dyad as a model for the two-person work of therapy
- The therapist’s own bodily and interoceptive responses as clinical information, a neurobiological reading of countertransference
- Relational trauma, dissociation and early-forming disturbances of the self
- Application to treatment of borderline personality disorder in reenactments of attachment trauma in the therapeutic alliance, in interactive repair, and in the movement from rupture back to connection
- The unconscious as embodied, affective and grounded in right-brain process
- Working directly with emotion across different forms of psychotherapy
About Allan Schore
Allan Schore, PhD, is a clinician-scientist and clinical psychologist on the clinical faculty of the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine. He is past Editor of the Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology, has lectured internationally and has received major honours from the American Psychological Association’s Divisions of Trauma Psychology and Psychoanalysis, as well as honorary membership of the American Psychoanalytic Association, which has described him as a monumental figure in psychoanalytic and neuropsychoanalytic studies.
In 2017 Sir Richard Bowlby, son of John Bowlby, placed Allan alongside his father as a figure on whose work future generations of scientists would build.
His foundational book, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, was published in 1994 and became the foundation for much of his later work. His later books include Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self, Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self, The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy, The Development of the Unconscious Mind, Right Brain Psychotherapy and The Right Brain and the Origin of Human Nature.
Who This Recording Is For
- Psychotherapists and psychoanalysts of all orientations interested in affect, attachment and the therapeutic relationship
- Clinicians working with relational trauma, dissociation and complex presentations
- Therapists working with personality disorder and borderline states
- Parent-infant and infant mental health clinicians
- Attachment-focused therapists, supervisors and trainers
- Clinical psychologists, counsellors and psychotherapists interested in the neurobiology of emotion
- Practitioners drawn to the implicit, nonverbal and body-based dimensions of therapy
- Trainees seeking a clearer sense of how affect regulation theory becomes clinical practice
Related recording
Allan Schore Legacy Interview: The Right Brain, Affect Regulation and the Emotional Self