Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self

Book excerpt: For over three decades, Allan N. Schore has authored numerous volumes, chapters, and articles on regulation theory, a biopsychosocial model of the development, psychopathogenesis, and treatment of the implicit subjective self. The theory is grounded in the integration of psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience, and it is now being used by both clinicians to update psychotherapeutic models and by researchers to generate research. First published in 1994, this pioneering volume represented the inaugural expression of his interdisciplinary model, and has since been hailed by a number of scientific and clinical disciplines as a groundbreaking and paradigm-shifting work. This volume appeared at a time when the problem of emotion, ignored for most of the last century, was finally beginning to be addressed by science, including the emergent field of affective neuroscience. After a century of the dominance of the verbal left brain, it presented a detailed characterization of the early developing right brain and it unique social, emotional, and survival functions, not only in infancy but across all later stages of the human life span. It also offered a scientifically testable and clinical relevant model of the development of the human unconscious mind. Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self acts as a keystone and foundation for all of Schore’s later writings, as every subsequent book, article, and chapter that followed represented expansions of this seminal work.