Allan Schore

Allan N. Schore (1943) is an American psychologist, professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and one of the most influential figures in the interpersonal neurobiology of affect. His work precisely articulates how the mother-infant bond literally—not metaphorically—sculpts the baby's right brain during the first 18-24 months of life.

Core Contribution: For four decades, Schore has integrated data from neuroscience, post-Freudian psychoanalysis (Bowlby, Winnicott, Kohut, Stern), attachment theory, neurodevelopment, and trauma. His thesis: the infant's right hemisphere—responsible for affective regulation, empathic connection, and the sense of the bodily self—develops in response to the caregiver's affective regulation. Without adequate affective attunement from the caregiver, the infant's right brain does not fully develop.

Key Concepts:

'Right brain to right brain communication': early affective communication between caregiver and infant is predominantly right-hemisphere-to-right-hemisphere (gesture, tone, gaze, rhythm) and shapes the infant's neural networks responsible for all subsequent adult affective regulation.

Self-regulation: the adult capacity for emotional self-regulation is NOT an innate faculty; it is built upon repeated interpersonal regulation in infancy ('co-regulation') that the infant progressively internalizes.

Right brain trauma: early traumatic experiences (neglect, abuse, disorganized attachment) produce documented damage in the right brain—less development of the right orbitofrontal cortex, alteration of the HPA axis, chronic adult affective dysregulation.

Importance for Constelando: Schore is an essential reference for understanding why work with an interrupted early bond touches such deep layers. The 'maternal wound' of the systemic approach has its exact neurobiological substrate in what Schore documents.