The workshop cites neurobiological research which highlights that the creative therapist’s interpersonal skill in empathically resonating with and regulating the client’s conscious and especially unconscious affective communications is central to facilitating structural changes and promoting growth. Such neuroplastic changes are vital for adaptive progressions of the client’s right brain emotion processing, relational, and stress regulating systems.

In line with the current two-person relational trend in psychotherapy, Dr Schore explains that such interpersonal neurobiological mechanisms occur in heightened affective moments of clinical regressions – defined as the process of returning to an earlier stage of development, a place of origin. Although the paradoxical process of regression may reflect a clinical deterioration, it may also represent a creative return to fundamentals and origins that can facilitate a potential reorganization; leading to better integration, healthy individuation, and increases in the adaptive capacities of play and intimacy.

Citing from his forthcoming books and using clinical case examples, Dr Schore presents neuropsychoanalytic models that differentiate spontaneous regressions in enactments of attachment trauma from controlled mutually synchronized regressions at different stages of therapy. He argues that the concept of regression, banished by the end of the last century, needs to return to the therapeutic domain.