Olivier Rouiller

My current interest in psychotherapy is nourished by psychoanalytic and psychodynamic approaches, influenced by French psychoanalysis and recent American formulations.

In my opinion, these approaches have highlighted central aspects for healing, first and foremost the notion of affective unconscious, initially brought forward by Freud and then revisited in more modern contexts.

Psychoanalysis gave rise to Bowlby's attachment theory (Bowlby 2008), which showed the importance of the quality of the bond in the early years of life for the establishment of Inner Working Models, another model of the unconscious.

I am also particularly interested in the modern contributions made by Allan Schore (Schore 2019), an American psychoanalyst who explains the relational affective unconscious as a way of being with the other that is implicit, non-verbal (Lyons‐Ruth 1999), and therefore unconscious, and whose neural substrates can be observed activating in the relationship (Dumas 2011). A similar idea is found in French psychoanalysis, notably with Marie Dessons who invites us to be attentive to the subtle (Dessons & Mazéas, 2024) when in contact with archaic material.

Another fundamental contribution of Freud's work is the notion of transference (Freud 1912), where these implicit and unconscious models play out in the patient-therapist dyadic relationship, thus offering the possibility of a corrective experience leading to a new way of being with the other and the emergence of the self or Self.

Finally, Freud provided his descriptions of psychic organizations, neurotic, narcissistic, psychotic, etc. (Bergeret 2021) which, in my opinion, are essential when working with a patient in psychotherapy. To what extent does the person in front of us have access to a solid self?

In my opinion, the concepts of the unconscious, attachment models, transference, and psychic structures are fundamental concepts for approaching psychotherapy that will be adapted to the person we encounter, and it is important for a therapist to train to recognize these phenomena and structures, not only in discourse, but also and especially in the implicit and non-verbal, with our *right brain* as Allan Schore suggests.

Bibliography

• Bergeret, J. (2021). Normal and pathological personality: Mental structures, character, symptoms. Dunod.
• Bowlby, J. (2008). Attachment: Second Edition. Basic Books.
• Dessons, M., & Mazéas, D. (2024). Listening to the subtle: Clinic of archaic states of the psyche. les Éd. d’Ithaque.
• Dumas, G. (2011). Towards a two-body neuroscience. Communicative & Integrative Biology, 4(3), 349‑352.
• Freud, S. (1912/1954). The Dynamics of Transference (M. Bonaparte & A. Berman, Trans.). Presses Universitaires de France.
• Lyons‐Ruth, K. (1999). The two‐person unconscious: Intersubjective dialogue, enactive relational representation, and the emergence of new forms of relational organization. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 19(4), 576‑617.
• Schore, A. N. (2019). Right Brain Psychotherapy (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology). W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated.