The relevance of neurobiology in the analytic dyad: A clinical moment with the girl who cries wolf in analysis

Abstract

This paper explores the neuroscientific concept of automatization outlined in Mark Solms's essay The Conscious Id (Solms, 2013) to illuminate the importance of attending to the primal role of affect and the unconscious processes which regulate affect – in both analyst and analysand – in analytic work. The paper presents clinical moments with an analysand, using these moments to explore automatization-in-action and to illuminate how maladaptive automatizations can be worked through, and how new approaches to life and ways of being in the world can be learned and realized during psychoanalytic treatment. I explore the transference enactment which takes place between analyst and analysand during “heightened affective moments” of treatment (Schore, 2012) and its relationship to automatization. The paper concludes with a consideration of the ways in which engagement with the “neuro” aspects of psychoanalysis can be conceptually as well as practically useful when navigating some of the more affectively and analytically challenging and tumultuous moments in our clinical encounters with analysands.

Keywords:

• affective unconscious states
• automatization
• candidate
• clinical situation
• enactment
• neuroscience
• phenomenology of change