ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that the clinical and experimental studies of the unconscious, implicit domain can do more than support a clinical psychoanalytic model of treatment, but rather this interdisciplinary information can elucidate the mechanisms that lie at the core of psychoanalysis. Recent neuroscientific information about the emotion-processing right brain is directly applicable to models of the psychotherapy change process. The chapter describes a surface, verbal, conscious, analytic explicit self versus a deeper non-verbal, non-conscious, holistic, emotional corporeal implicit self. It focuses on the expression of right brain unconscious mechanisms in affect-laden enactments and in the therapist's moment-to-moment navigation through these heightened affective moments by not explicit secondary process cognition, but by implicit primary process clinical intuition. Effective psychotherapy of attachment pathologies and severe personality disorders must focus on unconscious affect and the survival defense of pathological dissociation, "a structured separation of mental processes that are ordinarily integrated".
