The Frame as Listening and Accessing the Deep Emotional Life. The Lens to Reach the Subcortical Brain

Abstract

This article explains how the sense of ourselves is shaped in the deeper layers of our subcortical brain and body, then later coloring our emotional and conscious life. It shows how our conscious life sits on primary emotional systems with which all mammals are equipped. It proposes how an essential psychotherapy should reach the deepest stratum of our psyche in order to promote a process of transformation and consolidation in a new personal narrative and sense of self. It exposes a model to develop the skills for selective listening in the therapist to create a sense of being limbically seen and to organize the frame for the reprocessing of traumatic experience. At the end, it illustrates this process with an excerpt of a psychotherapy session in which the therapist helps the patient to access her own painful history organized on her early life; this history was permeating and organizing the conscious and adult life.