ABSTRACT
Left and right brain elements of experience are knitted into a coherent narrative by the left brain's ability to interpret what the right brain's emotionality generates but can't name. The right brain has a very limited capacity to interpret the nature of whatever emotion is being felt! Neurobiological reality provides additional interesting lessons for psychoanalytic clinicians: massive activation of one hemisphere inhibits activity in the other hemisphere, as a normal response. Healthy minds search for coherence. Maintaining coherence may trump reality testing if it eliminates intolerable anxiety over the meaning of a toxic event. The toxic event might be intrapsychic or in the world. The inability to integrate left and right brain cognitive/interpretive and emotional experiential elements leads to a de facto dissociation of intense experience. Teaching the left brain to dance is a way of reframing the relational aspect of intensive psychoanalytic therapy.
