ABSTRACT
The author fell in love with being a psychotherapist. And he won his doctorate with an experiment on effects of lobotomy on the ability of patients to learn unfamiliar information; “Learning and Lobotomy.” Early in his practice, he found that he and his clients conversed simultaneously with one another with two different “languages.” Actors called them “text and subtext.” Ordinary conversation is text. Subtext is interpersonal contact and elicits emotional reactions between conversants. Recognizing this difference changed the author from being a psychoanalytically oriented therapist in the 1950s to a relational therapist, who also saw this difference as significant to the left and right hemisphere (linear and nonlinear) ways of processing information. He also saw a difference between frontal and posterior brain ways of experiencing information (non-sensory and sensory). Finally, at the end of the chapter, he discusses the need to introduce homeostatic dynamics of the brain to understand personality processes, a paradigmatic shift in the ways we think about personality and psychotherapy.
