The Brain Does Not Develop in Isolation |
Brain development is shaped through relationships from the very beginning.
The limbic system and prefrontal cortex are highly experience-dependent and relational in origin.
Such findings radically undermine individualistic models in psychiatry and psychology.
As the brain is continually reshaped by experience, responses to distress must be relational and social.
From Internal Pathology to Relational Understanding
Since their beginnings, psychiatry, clinical psychology, and psychotherapy have all assumed that psychological and emotional distress has its origins inside isolated individuals: dysfunctional neurochemistry, faulty cognitions, or internal conflicts in the personal unconscious. Treatments have accordingly been conceptualized in terms of interventions into this internal functioning. Thus, we have psychiatric drugs to alter neurochemistry, cognitive techniques to correct distorted thinking, and interpretive approaches to uncover inner unconscious conflict. This view, as a whole, has its basis in an individualistic, “atomistic” philosophy of mind, which has dominated Western thought for much of the past few centuries and can be traced back to René Descartes.
Over the past few decades, however, relational and intersubjective models of mind have fundamentally challenged the ideology behind this. Such models reject the Cartesian assumption of an isolated mind (or brain), starting instead with the person in context—in the interpersonal and social worlds in which we are embedded. Following this, there has been a shift from what may have gone wrong with biological or cognitive processes to what has happened to a person relationally and socially, and how that might be repaired. (See my other blogs here and here for more on this.)
This blog picks up that conversation and poses a further question: How does the brain fit into the conversation—what does neuroscience tell us? Simply put, neuroscience strongly supports relational and intersubjective models of mind over those individualistic ones that remain at the core of mainstream approaches in psychiatry and psychology.
Brain Development Is a Two-Person Process
Prior to the arrival of attachment research and attachment neuroscience, brain development was thought to be internally driven and biologically determined, a thoroughly individual affair. We now know that not to be true. Interpersonal processes, principally those involving primary caregivers in the early years of the child’s life, are vital not only to the functional development of the brain but, in some important sense, to the literal development of parts of the organ itself (e.g., Schore, 1994; Schore & Schore, 2008; Siegel, 1999/2012).
Essentially, where we thought the........