Links Between Childhood Trauma, Psychosis, the Bayesian Predictive Processing Model of Brain Function, Transference, and the Mind Conceived as a Self-Organizing System

Speaker: Michael D. Garrett, MD

Research in the last four decades has shown a strong correlation between childhood adversity (e.g., sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional neglect) and psychosis, which recasts chronic psychosis as a trauma-related/stress/related disorder requiring psychotherapy as well as medication. This presentation will describe how psychotic symptoms can be understood as meaningful expressions of a psychotic person’s past history and current state of mind, manifestations of a person’s subjective world that provide invaluable guides to a person's emotional ailments. The talk will show how transference in psychotherapy can be understood as an inevitable consequence of the Bayesian predictive processing model of brain function and how delusions and other psychological defenses emerge as a natural consequence of the neuroscientific conception of the mind as a self-organizing system.