IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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meets/sees another person and looks into their face, observing their emotional expression. This usually resounds internally in what Vittorio Gallese (2001, 2003, 2006) defines as embodied simulation ; and a second mode based on mentalizing (Frith and Frith, 2005; Kernberg, 2015), which is the capacity to understand and predict other people’s behavior by attributing independent mental states to them. This capability is not connected to the mirror system, but rather to the Anterior Paracingular Cortex (Amaniti, 2008). Delia Lenzi’s, Claudia Trentini’s et al (2008) studies of mothers who watch their children’s expression of distress or joy show the intense mirror system activation, while watching their children’s face with more neutral, ambiguous expression activates the fronto- parietal areas of the left hemisphere. Utilizing interdisciplinary perspective of affective developmental neuroscience (neuropsychoanalysis) , Alan Schore (1999, 2011) pointed to his own consistent findings and those of many others, that the two brain hemispheres have different pattern of cortical- subcortical connections and different roles in various aspects of survival and learning about oneself in the world. Focusing on the early maturing Right Hemisphere, dominant for the first three years of life in the context of developmental neurobiology of attachment led him to propose that “the self-organization of the developing brain occurs in the context of a relationship with another self, another brain” (Schore, 1996, p. 60). Attachment transactions represent right hemisphere affective transactions between mother and infant (Schore, 1994). In the current neurobiological literature, the RH is dominant for ‘subjective emotional experiences’ (Wittling and Roschmann, 1993). “The interactive ‘transfer of affect’ between the right brains of the mother-infant and therapeutic dyads is … best described as ‘intersubjectivity’ … Current studies of the right hemisphere are thus detailing the neurobiology of neurosubjectivity ” (Schore 1999, p.52). Schore proposes that just as the left brain communicates its states to other left brains via conscious linguistic behaviors, so the right brain communicates via prosody, fine facial movements, rapid eye movements, gesticulation, etc. its unconscious states to the right brains that are tuned to receive these communications. Visuo-spacial right hemisphere is described as non-linear, best equipped to reflect and to communicate the emotional states of non-linear pulsing energy flows between the components of a self-organizing, dynamic right-lateralized mind-body system. In this context, Schore (1994) and Shevrin (2010) argue for Freud’s economic models, long considered obsolete, needing to be modernized and reintegrated into psychoanalysis. As opposed to the left hemisphere’s ‘linear’ consecutive analysis of information, the right hemisphere shows a high sensitivity to initial conditions and perturbation, a property of chaotic systems (Ramachandran et al. 1996). The right hemisphere utilizes image thinking, a holistic, synthetic strategy that is adaptive when information is “complex, internally contradictory and basically irreducible to an unambiguous context” (Rotenberg, 1994, p. 489). These charcteristics also apply to the primary process mentation, a right hemispheric function (Galin, 1974; Joseph, 1996) of the unconscious mind. Efrat Ginot (2007) examined how implicit, neurally encoded attachment styles unconsciously find repeated expression throughout life and come to life in enactments. She

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