Looking at dreams and the unconscious through the lens of Solms’ work, we are in many ways using a one person drive model. Opening this discussion to a two-person, dynamically interactive model, we can consider more about the unconscious and neurological correlates through the writings of Allan Schore. While Schore does not address the realm of dreams as much, the focus in early nonverbal unconscious infant/mother affective regulation is perhaps a look into the stuff that dreams are made of. Two-person model of the dynamic unconscious through the lens of neuro-psychoanalysis.
Another way in which unconscious motivational systems come into play in therapy is through the transference-countertransference relationship. Alan Schore, among others, has written a great deal about the ways in which emotionally significant interactions with important others take place within a psychobiological matrix, ‘right brain to right brain,’ as it were. The lens of neuropsychoanalysis on understanding transference-countertransference relationships is two-fold: first, it looks at how transference is a manifestation of implicit memories from early attachment relationships that are reactivated in the current therapy setting. Second, it considers the way in which therapy interactions play out at the psychobiological level such that patient and therapist are interactively regulating one another and experiencing the relationship in a bodily way.
Transference as a manifestation of early implicit memories is accessing the unconscious attachment schemas that are stored in the neural networks of the social brain (Cozzolino). These memories are implicit because they are very often preverbal, from the earliest years of life, or else contain the richly affective, unconscious nonverbal information from later attachment interactions. Cozzolino notes that transference allows access to this otherwise hidden learning in a way that neither patient nor therapist could verbally articulate – at least not at first. As these implicit relational memories are activated and retrieved, the therapy works to transform them from re-experiencing to reflective articulating. In neurological terms, this process is increasing the top-down and right-left integration of neural networks.