ABSTRACT
In this work I continue to utilize an interdisciplinary perspective to describe how attachment trauma in the first two years of life triggers the dissociative defense, how these stressful dysregulating interpersonal experiences are imprinted in a critical period of growth for the early developing right brain, and how early chronically stressful relational trauma promotes an enduring predisposition for the affective dampening right brain defense of characterological pathological dissociation over the life span. Beginning with a review of Janet’s classical work on the links between trauma and dissociation, I discuss the essential role of right brain processes in the interpersonal neurobiology of secure and insecure attachment trauma and in the developmental psychology and psychoneurobiology of dissociation. I then describe the dysregulation of right-lateralized limbic-autonomic circuits in dissociative psychopathology, and the role of right frontolimbic structures in the regulation of dissociation. I finally offer a psychobiological model of somatic dissociation that induces a disintegration of the right brain self system, as well as some implications for clinically working with right brain attachment trauma and dissociation in psychotherapy.
