ABSTRACT
Freud’s construct of ‘psychic apparatus’ and ‘psychic reality’ (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1983) became the foundation of the science ‘psychoanalysis’. These constructs remained the centerpiece of the various schools of psychoanalysis and dynamic psychotherapy for most of the twentieth century. Contemporary psychoanalysis confronts the unprecedented challenges to these constructs posed by the neurosciences heralding the current paradigm change, powerfully driven by advances in the understanding of the neurobiology of trauma. The current paradigm has transformed neuroscience’s earlier focus on the synapse – the ‘chemical imbalance theory of mental symptoms and illness’ – to advance the centrality of dysregulated neural networks as the preferred model. Schore’s extensive body of work offers a coherent formulation of the neurobiological mechanisms of relational trauma (2012) expanding his earlier (2001) observation that for relational trauma ‘[T]here is no one objective threshold at which all infants initiate a stress response; rather, this is subjectively determined and created within a unique organismic-environmental history’ (p. 206). Furthermore Schore (2001) posed critical questions to which we now have emerging answers:
What if the brain is evolving in an environment of not interpersonal security, but danger? Is this a context for the intergenerational transmission of psychopathology, and the origins of maladaptive infant health? Will early trauma have lasting consequences for future mental health, in that the trajectory of the developmental process will be altered?
