Introduction to self-attachment and its neural basis

We introduce the notion of self-attachment which, based on an interdisciplinary set of concepts, proposes a new psychotherapeutic technique. The underlying ideas include findings and paradigms in developmental psychology and neuroscience, neuroplasticity and long term term potentiation, fMRI studies on human bond making and religious experience, and experiments in energy based artificial neural networks. The proposed self-attachment therapeutic technique is distinguished by its intervention to create an internal and passionate affectional bond within the individual between the “adult self”, representing the logical and cognitive faculty, and the “inner child”, representing the unregulated and undeveloped emotional circuits. The aim is to create more optimal circuits for emotional regulation. The proposed self-attachment protocols internally emulate within the individual the interactions of a good enough primary care-giver and child in order to moderate the child's arousal level, minimise its negative affects and maximize its positive affects. These interactions are assumed, in developmental neuroscience and in developmental psychology, to be the basis of secure attachment of children with their parents, which leads to an optimal regulation of neurotransmitters, hormones, and the emotional dynamics of the individual. We report on several case studies of this technique in recent years. Finally, we propose a simple mathematical model to capture the impact of self-attachment protocols using the notion of strong patterns in energy based neural networks and employ a recently developed mathematical model to examine the impact of self-attachment using emotional and cognitive neural pathways for decision making.