Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self

Allan N. Schore sets out regulation theory here for the first time: a biopsychosocial account of how the earliest relationship between infant and caregiver shapes the maturation of the brain, and with it the capacity to manage emotion. He gathers psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience into a single frame, arguing that the early-developing right hemisphere carries the social, emotional, and survival functions that organize the implicit self and much of what analytic work calls the unconscious.

For the consulting room, the book locates affect regulation in the body and the dyad rather than in words. It reads the caregiver's attuned response, and its failures, as the material from which self-regulation is built, and it treats the same right-brain communication as active between therapist and patient. Schore first published the volume in 1994; the argument runs dense and heavily referenced, and it underpins the body of work that came after it.