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94 CHARACTERISTICS OF BRAIN AND BEHAVIORfaced by the adolescent brain, several considerations and questions become importantto the present notion of a functional metamorphosis of the self.If there are opposing orientations of right hemisphere attachment and left hemisphereindividuation in childhood, we can expect the primitive operation of theseorientations in the first years of life to have established certain motive structures(of self and object relations) that are implicit in guiding the child’s experienceand behavior. The normal struggles for autonomy and assertion of self-interest ofthe 9-year-old, for example, not only risk conflict with the current need for attachmentand close relations with the parent; they inevitably recall the child’shistory of these relational orientations, including both the successes of coping andresolving conflict and the traumatic results of relational failures. The patterns ofunderstanding relationships are unconscious and implicit, organized within thecorticolimbic networks of each hemisphere as memory templates, implicit predictionsthat expect new interactions to be like old ones.The same is true of the motive challenges of the adolescent period, except nowthere is a structured agenda for the reactivation of object relations. Just as biologicalmetamorphosis is a reawakening of the morphogenetic process at the pointof sexual maturation (Gilbert, 2003), human adolescence may be a reawakeningof the demands of psychological self-organization through the mechanisms ofobject relations. This is a fixed agenda of demands. Captured by the inexorableactions of gonadal hormones, the first task is to abandon the childhood self that isinconsistent with the new maturation and the anticipation of the impending adultidentity. Whereas peers naturally confirm the reality of this transition, parents holda longstanding concept of the relationship with a child that is no longer concordantwith the adolescent’s emerging understanding of self. The result is a clearneed to assert autonomy and correct parents on their anachronistic views.If we frame this prototypical drama in terms of hemispheric orientations, thechallenge of individuation is one of asserting left hemisphere conceptual processesto critically analyze both the family context and the childlike motives that wereadapted to it. Just as the separation-individuation phase of the toddler producedan anxiety-laden challenge to the attachment relation (Mahler, 1968), the exerciseof critical reasoning in the separation of the emerging self from the childhoodscene must result in a precarious stage of self-definition. When it is effective,the assertion of autonomy provides confidence in self-control. But the result isindeed a negation and abandonment of the child self, with its attendant securityof parental attachment. Just as the parent’s provision of a secure base was essentialto separation-individuation in infancy, a secure parental base (now increasinglyinternalized) is again essential as the adolescent enters what may be seen asthe object relations void of attachment negation.In terms of concepts of brain lateralization, what is lost in this transition is theright hemisphere’s holistic, contextual embeddedness of self in the global attachmentrelation of the juvenile period. The nascent, individuating self is quickly