For over three decades, Allan N. Schore has authored numerous volumes,
chapters, and articles on regulation theory, a biopsychosocial model of
the development, psychopathogenesis, and treatment of the implicit
subjective self. The theory is grounded in the integration of
psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience, and it is now being used by
both clinicians to update psychotherapeutic models and by researchers to
generate research. First published in 1994, this pioneering volume
represented the inaugural expression of his interdisciplinary model, and
has since been hailed by a number of scientific and clinical disciplines
as a groundbreaking and paradigm-shifting work.
This volume appeared at a time when the problem of emotion, ignored for
most of the last century, was finally beginning to be addressed by
science, including the emergent field of affective neuroscience. After a
century of the dominance of the verbal left brain, it presented a
detailed characterization of the early developing right brain and it
unique social, emotional, and survival functions, not only in infancy
but across all later stages of the human life span. It also offered a
scientifically testable and clinical relevant model of the development
of the human unconscious mind.
Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self acts as a keystone and
foundation for all of Schore's later writings, as every subsequent book,
article, and chapter that followed represented expansions of this
seminal work.
