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assertion that secure attachment facilitates and insecure attachment lowers resilience to stress and trauma throughout life. Detrimental early experiences with consequent neurobiological damage to the extended limbic system, which includes the Orbitofrontal cortex, can cause the child to develop a range of cognitive, emotional and behavioral problems, vitiating their adolescent and adult adjustment. The Orbitofrontal cortex is paramount in formulating the fundamental and relational cognitive-affective map. This is also the area where the first attachment related experiences and emotional memories are registered (Siegel, 1999; Balbernie 2001). The key message from neuroscientific studies of brain development is that “human connections shape the neural connections from which the mind emerges” (Siegel 1999, p. 2). During the first three years of life, three basic cortico-limbic circuits for the self-regulation of affect are activated and shaped by interaction with caregivers, thus providing the basis for how future significant emotions will be experienced and handled. In this context, Schore (2003, 2007) also studied the neurobiological correlates of early onset of dissociation among infants who were observed to be matching the rhythmic structure of their mother’s dysregulated states of both hyperarousal and dissociative hypoarousal. In the language of Attachment theory, attachment transactions are imprinted into implicit-procedural memory, mediated by the amygdala (not by the hippocampus, implicated in repression and unconscious symbolization and underdeveloped in the first year of life) thereby forming enduring ‘working models’ of encoded patterns of response and coping strategies of affect regulation to environmental challenge (Schore, 2000, p. 35). When activated, procedural memory generates unconscious anticipation of the future state of mind. According to Siegel, this has particular relevance for early trauma, as “repeated experiences of terror and fear can be engrained within the circuits of the brain as states of mind. With chronic occurrences, these states can become more readily activated (retrieved) in the future (and thus become) characteristic traits of the individual” (Siegel, 1999, p. 33). Synaptogenesis and axon myelinization continue in the Orbitofrontal cortex well into the second year of life. After this period of peak neuroplasticity of experience-dependent emotional learning, the “working models” of relationships tend to retain their character. However, the Orbitofrontal cortex tends to retain a remarkable degree of neuroplasticity throughout life and it is possibly through this pathway that in depth psychoanalytical therapy can have a neurobiological impact: “Intensive psychotherapy may be viewed as a long-term rebuilding and restructuring of the memories and emotional responses that have been embedded in the limbic system” (Andreasen, 2001, p. 331). The ongoing discussion over the dynamic nature of first unrepressed implicit imprints remains an enduring controversy, with implications for clinical work. One perspective (Clyman, 1991; Fonagy, 1999; BCPSG, 2007) sees the earliest imprints as cognitive procedural encoding of ‘self-with-other’, analogous to riding a bicycle. In these strictly procedural terms, the transference reenactment occurs because some feature of the analytic relationship is sufficiently similar to an already laid down relational working model ‘procedure’, so that priming – an automatic unmotivated process – elicits the procedural relationship pattern. Change can be achieved through ‘moments of meeting’, not necessarily interpretable. Whereas in Shevrin’s dynamic paradigm, unconscious intentions and expectations, in addition to context and the demands of the current situation, help determine exactly how and what will be
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