Real-Time Clinical Imaging of Psychodynamic Defense Mechanisms: pH dysregulation and the BrainMind of complex biopsychosocial field states.

The authors have developed a real-time, psychodynamic, clinical imaging protocol, for the assessment and treatment of BrainMind, complex biopsychosocial states. Utilizing infra-red spectroscopy, the end-tidal partial pressure of carbon dioxide (PetC02) is measured and recorded, in response to psychodynamic, cognitive and imagery challenges, taken from the patient’s case history; and matched to presenting medical, psychological and behavioural symptoms. Real-time measurements of PetC02, displayed as a digital wave-form, and simultaneously on a chart-strip recorder, show PetC02 values as a measure of systemic pH, changing rapidly, and outside of the patient’s conscious will or intention. Chronic and dynamic pH dysregulation, is a known mechanism for encoding state-changes in brain activity, at both the neuronal and neuro-circuitry levels. These changes can include all of the functional neurological disorders, as well as the traditional states historically classified as hysteria. The clinical protocol allows a full psychodynamic assessment, to be matched with the real-time presentation of symptoms, and crucially, to record the activation and de- activation of classic psychodynamic defense mechanisms, such as repression. Affective states, including representations of the subjective context for Pankseppian emotional systems, object relations and attachment psychodynamics, can be explored clinically, with therapeutic focus for neuropsychoanalytic practice, set within a wider superpositioned, field info-dynamic successor model, to legacy psychodynamics: psycho-systems analysis.