An organizing principle of regulation theory is that attachment communications are implicit, affective and nonverbal, and that unconscious affect regulation plays a critical psychobiological role within mother–infant and patient–therapist dyads (Schore, 1994, 2003). A young infant functions in a fundamentally unconscious way, and unconscious processes in an older child or adult can be traced back to the primitive functioning of the infant. This neuropsychoanalytic perspective argues that both optimal development and effective psychotherapy promote an expansion of the complexity of the right brain implicit self, the psychobiological substrate of the human unconscious. This right lateralized system is dominant for
the regulation of affect and bodily states, stress, empathy, pain, intersubjectivity, self-awareness, intuition, creativity,
and humanness. As compared with classic cognitive and behavioral approaches, psychodynamic treatment is a conceptualized to act as a growth-facilitating environment for not left brain conscious emotion regulation but right brain unconscious affect regulation.