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Drives, Affects, Id Energies, and the Neuroscienceof Emotions: Response to the Commentaries by JaakPanksepp (Bowling Green, Ohio)Jaak Pankseppaa Department of Psychology, Bowling Green State University, 1001 East Wooster Street,Bowling Green, OH 43403, e-mail:Published online: 09 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Jaak Panksepp (1999) Drives, Affects, Id Energies, and the Neuroscience of Emotions: Responseto the Commentaries by Jaak Panksepp (Bowling Green, Ohio), Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal forPsychoanalysis and the Neurosciences, 1:1, 69-89, DOI: 10.1080/15294145.1999.10773248

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Response to Commentaries

------Freeman, T. (1989), Development and Psy-chopathology: Studies in Psychoanalytic Psychiatry.New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Clifford YorkeFieldings South Moreton, Nr DidcotOxon OX]] 9ABEnglande-mail: scbyorke@aol.com

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Drives, Affects, Id Energies, and the Neuroscience of EmotionsResponse to the Commentaries by Jaak Panksepp (Bowling Green, Ohio)

The neural analysis of emotions is slowly approachingadolescence-full of hope and passion, with some tell-tale signs of scientific maturity. On the other hand, thediscipline of psychoanalysis grew up too rapidly, andit must now consider whether its precocious growthskipped over some critical developmental stages. Al-though psychoanalysis has traditionally shared a muchdeeper and broader perspective on human emotional-ity than neuroscience, the latter now has the tools forgenerating a more compelling scientific view of thebasic emotions and the infrastructure of the id thanwas ever possible for Freud or his intellectual descen-dants. Although Freud always believed that psycho-analysis needed to be grounded on the naturalfunctions of the brain, psychoanalytic and neuroscien-tific approaches to the study of mind have kept theirdistance for the better part of the twentieth century.Some investigators, including those represented in thepresent interchange, are now ready to challenge andto mend those old schisms. This will be an importantundertaking if the resulting endeavors help us betterunderstand the foundations of human nature-to clar-ify the essential neuropsychological abilities that areprovided for us as birthrights. To make progress onthis problem, there has to be some type of reasonable,empirically based specification of the basic emotionalvalues (i.e., id structures) that are genetically createdwithin the normal human brain. It is now evident thatthere are more innate systems within the mammalianbrain than those devoted to the provisioning of nour-ishment and sexual passions, as early psychoanalyticthought prescribed. The clarification of the variousbasic emotional feelings within the human brain/mind

Jaak Panksepp is Distinguished Research Professor of Psychobiology,Emeritus, Department of Psychology, Bowling Green State University,Ohio.

can set the stage for a lasting science of human natureand an elucidation of its intrinsic values.

First, let me admit to some impatience with theslow and tortuous pace with which the study and dis-cussion of emotions has been proceeding in modernpsychology, philosophy, and neuroscience. Of course,the alexithymia of the neuroscience community is easyto understand: Since we cannot directly observe theinternal feelings of other humans or animals, most in-vestigators avoid talking about them entirely. By com-parison, the more evident abilities of organisms tobehave and to integrate information through learningand memorial abilities has received abundant experi-mental attention. However, we must occasionallypause to recall that many of those behavioral and cog-nitive capacities evolved to serve the basic bodily andemotional needs of organisms-anchoring processesthat are not as easy to address scientifically becausethey are hidden within the realms of more ancientbrain dynamics. However, as physicists learned earlierthis century, it is within the relatively invisible under-belly of nature that the most profound scientific prob-lems reside. Just as physicists cannot yet seegravitation or electrons directly, the basic affectiveprocesses of the brain must be measured indirectlythrough neural analyses of human and animal behav-iors. The importance of such studies in revealing hu-man nature, consciousness, and its various affectivedisorders is obvious, but the path to scientifically clari-fying those genetically provided value-creating pro-cesses of the brain (i.e., the basic affects) is not.

To scientifically understand the neural nature ofaffect, we may need some radical methodological andconceptual departures such as accepting evidence frombrain research on other animals to illuminate the hu-man condition. Just consider one simple bit of logic:If affective feelings do exist in the minds of otherorganisms and have causal consequences for their be-

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haviors, we will never adequately understand theirbrains, or our own for that matter, unless we incorpo-rate various new functional concepts into our thinking.Although neuroscientists rarely consider the potentialimportance of such neuropsychological issues for un-derstanding the functional organization of the brain,such concepts are fundamental to the psychoanalyticenterprise. The question before us now is whether theperspectives of these disciplines can be fruitfullyblended. As Solms and Nersessian have summarizedand seven commentators have now appraised, manyof Freud's views on these issues can be seen to becongruent with emerging lines of neuroscientificthought. This, of course, does not mean that Freud'searly neurophysiological conjectures had much sub-stance, but he may have perceived certain psychologi-cal dimensions with a clarity that was sufficient for usto now consider how they might be related to brainmechanisms. Obviously, in the absence of a respect-able database, most of what we will have to say willbe conjectural and hence only the first step toward thetypes of radical studies that are needed to evaluate theintrinsic neural nature of affective processes.

I respect and admire the views of all the commen-tators who participated in the present discussion, andlet me now provide some critical feedback on keypoints that have been raised. I will address successivecontributions in the order they arrived at my desk.This type of serial processing will lead to some redun-dancies, but I hope they will at least be on major issuesthat deserve reinforcement. I am thankful that therewas little call for me to readdress Freud's perspectives,except for Yorke's and Green's grave concerns aboutmy seemingly hasty dismissal of the Freudian conceptof "drive." Accordingly, except for struggling withthe "drive" concept several more times, I shall largelyfocus on nondoctrinaire issues, and will use the com-mentaries as departure points for elaborating ideasabout how a better understanding of emotions couldbe cultivated from both neuroscientific and psychoan-alytic perspectives.

Schore's Commentary

Schore provides a provocative commentary slantedmore toward the modern contributions of neurosciencethan those of psychoanalysis. In my estimation, thisis the proper emphasis: Perhaps for the first time, wecan interpret key psychoanalytic ideas in ways thatare testable in traditional scientific ways. Schore fo-cuses on two key themes: the nature of the dynamic

Jaak Panksepp

Freudian unconscious and the development of affect.He proceeds to strongly endorse the role of the righthemisphere in the elaboration of both.

At the heart of his analysis, well-informed by therecent neuroscience revolution, there is a di-lemma-the existence of "unconscious primary pro-cess affect-laden cognition. ' , On the surface, thisconcept appears burdened by a contradiction that hasbecome endemic in the field, namely the postulationof emotions (and even affects) that are unconscious.I tend to wince at this apparent contradiction. We arecurrently in an era where there is an appropriate eager-ness to grant unconscious processes such a vast rolein the economy of the mind, that we may at timesfail to see consciousness where it exists. Even thoughFreud was the first to conceptualize the vast uncon-scious origins of anxiety and certain other feelings aswell as the information that triggers them, we stillneed much better empirical criteria for conscious andunconscious processes, and a greater recognition thatthere may be several varieties of each.

The empirically based recognition of uncon-scious emotional processing in modern cognitive psy-chology is based largely on the abundant evidence thatultrarapid exposure of individuals to emotional stimuli(e.g., angry faces) can generate autonomic responseswithout any apparent verbally accessible, consciousdecoding of the precipitating stimulus events (Ohman,1993). Such effects are now commonplace, and it haseven been documented that certain emotional circuits,including those of the right amygdala, are selectivelyaroused when this type of unconscious emotional pro-cessing occurs (Morris, Ohman, and Dolan, 1998).However, the critical emotional issue should not sim-ply be whether individuals can or cannot cognitivelyidentify the external stimuli that provoked autonomicresponses, but whether they have some concurrent,internally experienced affective consequences that canbe measured. This latter possibility is commonly ig-nored, as if the experience of affect itself were notimportant to monitor empirically. I would suggest thata careful probing of relevant phenomenological issuesmay indicate that during such "cognitively uncon-scious" events, most subjects do have measurable af-fective responses.

We should certainly consider that there may re-ally be no unconscious affects. Affects may only besubconscious in specific experimental situationswhere attentional and social desirability resources aredeployed otherwise. I do not mean to imply that thereare no unconscious neural processes that lead up tothe experience of affect. Of those there are bound to

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be many, but all forms of affective arousal may atleast be potentially conscious. An individual may nothave good and clear language to describe such affectsor may wish to deny them for various personal rea-sons, but in appropriate settings (perhaps an ideal onebeing a psychoanalytic couch) all affective processesshould be consciously retrievable. Perhaps in the ex-perimental analysis of emotions we should also be de-voting more effort to the study of strong emotionalsituations as opposed to affectively modest stimuli.Obviously, consciousness was designed in such a wayas to allow organisms to make better behavioralchoices, and if the affective components of an experi-ment have no consequences for outcomes, might it notbe wiser to leave them unattended and unreported?

If not explicitly evaluated, mild affective re-sponses may tend to remain unreported. Perhapsadults do not typically pay close attention to variouskinds of mild positively or negatively valencedarousal, or due to lack of practice, they may no longerhave the skills or interest to communicate small wavesof affect on the stream of existence. Indeed, adult re-sponses to the world may typically be so cognitivelystreamlined, that they are habituated to the types ofmodest affective arousal that are typically produced bylooking at pictures of emotional faces. Perhaps youngchildren would be more responsive since they havenot yet learned to repress affective processes and theassociated ideas.

A view of development endorsed by most in-sightful thinkers, including Freud and Schore, is thatorganisms are born fundamentally affective but thatwith maturation they become ever increasingly cogni-tive (also see York's elaboration of this point). Asone approaches adulthood, cognitive evaluations maybecome so habitual that one can often appreciate theemotional significance of external events without anynoteworthy affective arousal. Conversely, by being as-sociated with powerful emotional situations, certainlines of cognitive activity may become imbued withthe ability to rekindle affect. Thus each person's cog-nitive terrain or epigenetic landscape that emergesgradually during development has surely been moldedby a variety of genetically provided affective pro-cesses.

Although some preliminary neuroscientific prog-ress has now been made on how' 'value tagging" tran-spires in the brain (LeDoux, 1996; Schultz, 1998),Schore provides other provocative ideas for us to con-sider, with a special focus on the probable role offrontolimbic circuits which have long been known toparticipate in the more subtle aspects of emotionality

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(McLean, 1990). However, we remain remote fromany detailed understanding of how various affects andtheir conscious ramifications are elaborated within thebrain-mind. I believe this is largely because so littleresearch is currently being conducted on affective is-sues. When this type of work is eventually done, wemay be surprised to find that many higher areas ofthe brain process information more unconsciously orsubconsciously than the various lower brain systemsthat directly mediate emotionality.

Schore may be only partially correct in sug-gesting that it is largely "the right brain-mind psycho-biological system that processes emotionalinformation at levels beneath awareness," the impli-cation being that the speaking hemisphere may bemore adept at the conscious perception of emotions.In this type of analysis, we should not leave subcorti-cal issues out of consideration. In line with Schore'sanalysis, it may be worth considering that many ofthe higher emotional cognitive-type functions of thebrain, such as the perceptual and expressive prosodicskills of the right hemisphere, may in fact be moreunconscious than the lower affective functions,namely those elaborated by the limbic system and itsbrain stem connections (Panksepp, 1998a).

Although this may seem like turning commonsense, or at least accepted wisdom, on its head, thereshould be great adaptive value in streamlining highercognitive abilities, so that they are able to anticipateand regulate many emotional affairs without much af-fective deliberation. For instance, day-to-day preda-tor-prey relationships may be more emotionallyunstimulating for the participants than we might beprone to imagine. Each may be so well habituated toeach other's abilities, that there is little need to sustainintense emotional arousal during pursuit or flight. Onlyin extremis, where the thwarting of desires becomesmanifest, would a full affective response be recruited.A case in point in humans is the fact that many volun-tary emotional expressions are controlled indepen-dently of the instinctive ones that accompany trueemotions (Rinn, 1984). It is generally believed thatspontaneous emotions are more richly imbued withaffect than are voluntary displays. It is when the higherregulatory abilities become deficient that unbearableemotional distress begins to emerge, all too commonlyto the point where individuals desperately need thesupport of others, and "the primary role of the psycho-therapist is to act as an affect regulator."

Obviously, we need more research that focuseson cortical-subcortical interrelations and their mani-festations in consciousness. The felt intensity of emo-

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tional experience may be largely a subcortical idfunction. Indeed, the basic neurology for a primitiveform of affective consciousness within the brain stemis a distinct possibility (Panksepp, 1998b). This maybe quite different from modes of cognitive conscious-ness generated by thalamocortical neural hierarchiesthat allow us to be so acutely aware of the externalworld (Baars, 1996; Newman, 1997). As Yorkepointed out, Freud shared a similar belief in a funda-mental duality of consciousness, as he asserted that"The id, cut off from the external world, has a worldof perceptions of its own." In other words, affect canbe generated internally with no external precipitatingevents. Many brain stimulation studies affirm thatview (Panksepp, 1985).

Thus, we may need to entertain several distinctforms of consciousness (and varieties of unconscious-ness) in the brain-at the very least, of cognitive andaffective varieties. This should not be too problematican assumption if we consider the number of brainfunctions that have multiple parallel and hierarchicalcontrols-just consider. the dorsal and ventral routesin the visual system. Likewise, there may be distinctventral affective (hypothalamic-limbic) and dor-sal-exteroceptive (thalamic-neocortical) modes ofconsciousness. If we accept the possibility of such di-chotomies, resembling only superficially the well-ac-cepted right and left hemisphere dualities, we may beable to make better sense of the dilemmas that themany seemingly unconscious brain processes providefor our consideration: Perhaps the biggest one is thecontinuing denial of consciousness to other speciesthat are genetically closely related to us (Budiansky,1998). Although their dorsally driven rational-cogni-tive consciousness may be paltry compared to ours(i.e., they may have comparatively few thoughts com-pared to us), they may, in fact, be equally consciousat the more ventral affective levels. Although we can-not at present monitor their affects any better than wecan directly measure the affect of humans, we mightbe wiser (and certainly more ethical in our various"animal use" endeavors) to assume emotional sen-tience in all other mammals than to assume its absence.

Thus, from the perspective of cognitive con-sciousness, most emotional states appear to reflect un-conscious processes. From the perspective of affectiveconsciousness, the cognitive contents of mind oftenseem to emerge from unconscious processes. If onlyone form of consciousness typically prevails at anyone time (perhaps because they do share attentional"searchlights" driven by primitive self-representationnetworks), and external events become ever more at-

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tention grabbing as one matures, the epigenetic land-scape of our adult lives may be developmentallybiased toward cognitive forms of consciousness andvarious forms of ego-protective emotional repressions,projections, and sublimations. This may help explainwhy so much xenophobia prevails in scientific discus-sions of internal affective experiences. Special experi-mental procedures, perhaps variants of psychoanalysisand subtle behavioral choice measures in animals,need to be implemented to study affective experiencesmore systematically than they have been in the past.

In sum, affective and cognitive streams of con-sciousness may be at center stage of attentional pro-cesses under different circumstances, leading to afluctuation of what is subconscious at anyone momentof time. Most current scientific experiments are de-signed in ways that view consciousness largely fromthe cognitive, higher information-processing perspec-tives. This may tend to make many affective processesseem more unconscious than they really are. For in-stance, maybe our brains tend to shift spontaneouslyfrom right hemisphere processing to left hemisphereprocessing or dorsal brain to ventral brain processing,and vice versa, during the ebb and flow of social andvarious other world engagements. If this is so, thenthe right hemisphere may not be as fundamentally un-conscious as Schore postulates. It may simply be morelikely to be in the subconscious mode when we areactively communicating with strangers and casual ac-quaintances. Friendly therapeutic environments, espe-cially of the psychoanalytic sort, may help theconscious functions of the right hemisphere to emerge(e.g., for some relevant issues, see Ross, Homan, andBuck, 1994).

Although we know very little empirically aboutthose possibilities, we do need to entertain all reason-able possibilities and to map out empirical predictionsof the various views. Schore's analysis highlighted forme the potential. need to broaden our concepts of thenature of consciousness in order to clarify the underly-ing dynamics of mind. We are fortunate to live in anera where many scholars are challenging us to thinkabout consciousness in more naturalistic and organicways than has been traditional in cognitive psychology(e.g., Dretske, 1995; Cairns-Smith, 1996; Romijn,1997; Searle, 1998).

Shevrin's Commentary

Shevrin raises a variety of critical issues regardingattempts to bring Freudian theory in line with the types

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of neuroscience perspectives I shared. His analysisalso highlights the need to address issues related tounconscious and conscious aspects of affective experi-ence. While Schore entertained the possibility that theright-brain "processes emotional information beneathawareness," Shevrin highlights the fact that for Freud,"affects cannot be preconscious or unconscious, butare quintessentially conscious." To follow up pointsalready raised, the apparent disconnect between thoseviews could be understood by postulating the existenceof at least two distinct but interactive forms of con-sciousness-the raw, embodied feelings of primary af-fective consciousness (which, in their primarygenetically dictated form, are not propositional sincethey do not represent the external world), and the ex-teroceptive awareness channels of cognitive con-sciousness (which are fundamentally propositionaland representational, and hence more computationallyinstantiable). If this is so, we could easily envisionunconscious ideas (a cardinal concept in Freudian the-ory) which might activate consciously experienced af-fects.

Such a dichotomy of consciousness is marginallysupported by the demonstrated existence of distinctspheres of consciousness in split-brain individuals. Isay "marginally" because the right and left hemi-sphere varieties may not truly reflect dramatically dif-ferent forms, but merely the type of dichotomy thatis achievable by tearing holographic images in two.However, since the divided hemispheres can be con-currently influenced by shared affective influences(Gazzaniga and LeDoux, 1978), perhaps by subcorti-cal emotional circuits from below, a distinction in con-sciousness along the lines of dorsal somatic-eorticaland ventral visceral-limbic functions remains an at-tractive way to view some of the major currents of themind. The parceling of consciousness into cognitiveand affective forms may allow us to generate concep-tual coordinates that may help elucidate some of thedifficulties between the views I espoused and thosethat Solms and Nersessian attributed to Freud regard-ing the qualitative and quantitative aspects of af-fective experience.

From the neuroscience view to which I subscribe,the various emotional "command" systems of the vis-ceral-limbic brain can be distinguished from eachother in qualitative terms (e.g., \vhich neuropeptidesand perhaps which types of neural resonances havebeen aroused in the extended systems for SELF repre-sentation) but also in quantitative terms (e.g., howintensely the underlying substrate is aroused in anemotion-specific manner). Thus, the qualitative fea-

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tures may emerge more from distinguishable emo-tional command systems (as well as social learningprocesses), while many of the quantitative influencesmay emerge not only from the degree of specificarousal within each system, but also the degree ofmore generalized arousal in those widely ramifyingnorepinephrine and serotonin brain systems whichclearly modulate both cognitive and affective pro-cesses. Indeed, each of these systems has distinct limbswhich are more concentrated in cognitive and emo-tional areas of the brain.

Many of the difficulties that arise from the discus-sion of the functions of the mind postulated by Freudwill depend on how we define terms like conscious-ness, drive, pleasure, and unpleasure. Some of theseconcepts may turn out to be little more than semanticclass-identifiers for a host of related neuropsychologi-cal processes, while others may represent processesthat are closer to the "natural kinds" that we hope toobtain through a precise carving of nature at its joints.Thus, I am prone to view the Freudian concept of"drive" as a class-identifier, like the traditional psy-chological terms emotions and motivations, whichconceptually parse fairly broad domains of neuropsy-chological space. For instance, although there is nounitary motivational system in the brain, there are avariety of distinct interoreceptive systems that gaugevarious bodily imbalances and contribute to specificregulatory/motivational abilities of each organism. Iexpended considerable effort earlier in my career seek-ing to characterize the brain systems that elaboratethe drive of hunger (Panksepp, 1974), and there are avariety of interoreceptive inputs, both metabolic andhormonal, that control these urges. Emotional systemsmay have remarkably similar infrastructures, but in-stead of simply helping regulate bodily states, theygauge internal brain homeostatic functions (i.e., howwell various circuits are reflecting and adapting to en-vironmental challenges).

One now has to consider such complexities ifone is going to try to implement any global Freudianconcept like "drive" or "pleasure" in neuroscienceresearch. Shevrin provides a compelling analysis ofaffect and "pleasure" with which I basically agree,but to understand those from a neuroscience perspec-tive, we may also need a more resolved concept of"drive" than existed in Freudian theory. Psychobiolo-gists who have tried to understand pleasure, recognizethat the intensity of hedonic experience in various situ-ations is linked strongly to degrees of the specific ho-meostatic imbalances (Cabanac, 1971), which wouldmake the drive concept multidimensional, and perhaps

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the pleasure principle also. Then again, it is suffi-ciently early in neuroscience research, that a general-ized pleasure may yet emerge from brain areas suchas the shell of the nucleus accumbens which is im-portant in mediating gustatory pleasure (Berridge andRobinson, 1998). We must now determine whetherit is important in mediating other forms of pleasureas well.

Hence, there are various maneuvers by which onecould try to make homogeneous "drive" and "plea-sure" concepts compatible with the neuroscience data.For instance, one emotional system participates in thebehavioral outputs of various regulatory-drive sys-tems: The generalized "wanting" generated byarousal of the lateral hypothalamic dopamine basedSEEKING system (Berridge and Robinson, 1998;Panksepp, 1998a), is essential for organisms to be-come appetitively engaged with the world when theyhave any of a variety of motivational urges, whethereating, drinking, cruising for sex, retrieving lost ba-bies, or seeking to play (Panksepp, 1981, 1986). Thisemotional system has one or more distinct qualitativedimensions-characteristic types of behavioral pre-sentations as well as consciously accessible affectivefeelings (e.g., energized eagerness)-but it also has thequantitative dimension of "muchness" as reflected inthe overall degree of appetitive arousal an organismexhibits. One could envision the arousal of this systemto generate psychic "drive," even though the systemobviously also mediates positive incentive func-tions-the energized appetitive engagement that leadsorganisms to indulge in the various pleasures of con-summatory activities.

However, there are many other basic emotive sys-tems in the brain, presumably each having distinct be-havioral outputs and feeling tones. Should weincorporate all of them into a singular "drive" con-cept or should we distinguish among them? In antici-pation of the comments made by Yorke and Green, Ifavor the latter alternative. I do not believe the differ-entiation among these systems emerges simply fromego or superego functions acting upon a single undif-ferentiated drive process. I would anticipate that thevarious brain systems that contribute to distinct"drives" and "pleasures" are mediated by distinctgenetic mechanisms. Even though social learning con-tributes enormously to how we utilize and experienceour affects in real life, social learning does not createthe various affects. In recognizing qualitatively differ-ent affects and brain emotional systems, we createmany opportunities for explaining the diversity of he-donic experiences in humans and the existence of sim-

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ilar natural kinds in animals. Shevrin provides aprovocative analysis of these issues in his discussionof the relationship of affect to motivation. Whetherand how we should distinguish the class of experiencesthat are motivational and those that are affective re-mains an important challenge for us to consider.

I would reemphasize, however, that the arousal ofsuch emotional systems does not faithfully representevents in the world, but rather, the major evolutionarypassages in brain evolution through which our ances-tors progressed. Only by interacting with the here-and-now worlds in which organisms find themselves dothese evolutionary representations become connectedor tagged to the ongoing exteroceptive experiences andthoughts of organisms. The same presumably appliesfor all of the basic emotional systems, even thoughrelevant facts remain scarce. Major inroads have beenmade in analyzing higher regulatory components inamygdala and other basal ganglia for the FEAR andSEEKING systems (e.g., LeDoux, 1996; Schultz,1998), but comparable work remains to be initiatedfor most other emotional systems.

In analyzing value-tagging, it is regrettable thatthe lower components of emotional systems (e.g., cir-cuits below the amygdala for the FEAR system) havecommonly been viewed merely as output components.It remains likely that a great deal of learning and plas-ticity occurs within the lower reaches of these emo-tional systems, for instance within the periaqueductalgray (PAG). The lower components appear to be es-sential for coordinating and orchestrating the manyoutputs of emotional arousal, including, I believe, thegeneration of primal affective experience/conscious-ness (Panksepp, 1998a,b). Hence, the vast neural path-ways between higher areas such as the amygdala andlower areas such as the PAG are better conceptualizedas integrative systems rather than mere outputsystems.

As Shevrin emphasizes, all these systems need tobe viewed in terms of hierarchical levels of control,and hence, regardless of one's views on the multiplici-ties of consciousness in mammalian brains, the distinc-tion between conscious and unconscious processesmay need to be more multidimensional than has beentraditional. For instance, cognitive and affective formsof consciousness may each have several distinct levelsof hierarchic organization. To accommodate theseemerging views as well as new neuroscientific find-ings, Freudian theory certainly needs to be molded andupdated. At the risk of offending traditionalists, I triedto point out several speculative ways by which thismight be done. New information and perspectives are

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surely the only ingredients that can allow some ofFreud's original insights to be crafted into scientifi-cally testable ideas that continue to evolve.

Of course, comparable conceptual needs exist inmodern neuroscience. One of the most poignant fail-ures of neuroscience has been its inability to deal ef-fectively with global state variables such as emotionsand other affective states of the brain. Traditionalistsin neuroscience, just like their behavioristic predeces-sors, are still trying to weed and discard affective con-cepts from brain research. This makes some ofShevrin's questions even more meaningful: "Affectinforms us of what's doing in our minds and bodies.But why do we need to be so informed? ... what evo-lutionary event made the development of affect adap-tationally advantageous?" In a rigorous scientificsense, we do not know the answers to these evolution-ary quandaries. However, the revelations of molecularbiology and advances in population genetics duringthe past half-century, in combination with the recogni-tion of the deep neural homologies that bind us toour animal ancestors, give us glimmers of potentialanswers. Affects may be the ways that certain genesand their various interactions inform us of fundamen-tal evolutionary values that are not only the harbingersof intended actions, but also the processes that allowsocial creatures like mammals, who depend on eachother for survival, to communicate efficiently and ur-gently their needs, desires, and intentions to others.

I do not think it can be overemphasized that thebasic affects need not be learned: They emerge di-rectly from the evolutionary epistemology of the brain.And it is not just individual survival that is at issuehere. Affects help bind individuals spontaneously intocommunities in ways that may dramatically facilitatethe survival of certain groups over others (Sober andWilson, 1998). If this analysis is on the right track,the therapeutic enterprise needs to be imbued with amuch greater appreciation for affective processes(e.g., Greenberg, 1993). In psychoanalysis, it may nolonger be sufficient for the therapist to be a passiverepository for the affective turmoil of clients, but heor she may also take more active responsibility forbeing mentors in the affective dynamics of clients'lives. In any event, as Shevrin's provocative commen-tary makes clear, how we will scientifically categorizeand taxonomize the basic and derivative affects andtheir relations to consciousness will remain a majorchallenge for neuroscientific and psychoanalyticthought for some time to come. My personal take onsuch issues, recently summarized (Panksepp, 1998a),

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may be one reasonable framework for further devel-opments.

Yorke's Commentary

Yorke raises many critical issues for any substantiverapprochement between psychoanalysis and neurosci-ence. He emphasizes the need for' 'a clear comprehen-sion of each other's basic positions" and highlightsplaces where we may already have failed to see eyeto eye. Before I address those issues, let me first agreewith the didactic view Yorke ascribed to Freud whichis not sufficiently appreciated, namely that Freud"himself always thought his ideas open to modifica-tion and even replacement in the light of further dis-coveries." Hence, we should not be doctrine-bound onany issue. Since Freud's death, the number of relevantneuroscientific discoveries has been so vast that it willrequire concerted efforts, sometimes against the grainof long-standing traditions, to bring psychoanalyticthinking and practice in line with those findings, andall interested parties should become skilled at navigat-ing the brain as well as the mind. I will try to defendsome of my seemingly transgressive views that Yorkeso eloquently criticized.

Let me take Yorke's last concern first-that thepsychoanalytic situation is not the place where psy-chopharmaceutical agents (poisons?) can yield anyuseful new knowledge. In this context, I would notethat one reason behaviorism fell into disfavor as amajor intellectual force in psychology was due to asimilar fencing-in of a discipline so that potentiallyuseful contacts with other fields of knowledge wereoften arbitrarily precluded. Although we should allquestion the wisdom of cavalierly using patients assubjects in psychopharmacological experiments, Ithink many ongoing drug studies in normal individu-als, difficult as they are to implement, might greatlybenefit from the empirical application of new psycho-analytic tools. As Yorke indicates, psychoanalytic ap-proaches have the potential to capture the mind indeeper and more meaningful ways than the simple pa-per and pencil scales that are the preferred tools ofexperimental psychologists. In this era of biologicalpsychiatry, we do need to probe more deeply howthe widely used psychotherapeutic drugs modify theemotional dynamics of human personality and theother dimensions of the human mind (e.g., Klein,1987). Psychoanalysis could help craft the neededtools.

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This is not the place to try to detail relevant meth-odological issues, but to emphasize that there will soonbe a major new generation of psychotropics based onthe study of peptide systems which modulate specificaffects, moods, and other motivations (Panksepp,1993). A demonstration of the efficacy of SubstanceP antagonists in the treatment of depression, based onanimal work analyzing separation distress, hasemerged since I wrote my original commentary on thepresent target article (Kramer et aI., 1998). It wouldbe a pity if the full complexity of human emotionallife were not explored as more and more novel chemi-cal agents become available. The many drugs that havemuch less specific effects on emotional processes (i.e.,the current mainstays of biological psychiatry) alsodeserve the careful experiential scrutiny of psychoana-lytically oriented investigators. At proper doses, theseagents are simply not "poisons" but rather specificmodulators of neurochemical processes. Empiricalstudies of how human minds respond to specific neu-roactive agents in various emotionally interesting situ-ations remain scarce (for an excellent recent example,see Knutson et aI., 1997). It is now generally acceptedthat low brain serotonin activity makes both animalsand humans more emotionally temperamental andmore likely to exhibit various antisocial acts (Coccaro,1996). These types of studies could enrich the view-points of those who ascribe to either the "classical"or the "romantic" approach to understanding the hu-man mind.

Certain emerging views of the mind can be seenas blends of the best findings of idiographic and nomo-thetic approaches. Indeed, I see my own integrativeeffort in "affective neuroscience" as an attempt tobridge the findings of those who would "split livingreality into its elementary components" and those whorecognize the importance of accepting the complexityof the complete organism. The combination of theseviews can lead to a materialism without any simple-minded reductive physicalism-a scientific viewwhere one does not simply try to reduce complexityinto "nothing but" the component parts but seeks"supervenience" relationships among viewpoints. Su-pervenience is a philosophical concept of establishinglinkages between levels of analysis (see Kim, 1993;Dretske, 1995, for thorough discussions). The strongerthose relationships, the better! However, weaker rela-tionships, such as those that might typically be ob-served during the systematic study of humansubjective experiences following carefully selected bi-ological interventions, should also be invaluable forguiding our thinking into productive frames of refer-

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ence. In my estimation, the study of the quantum prop-erties of matter, as has become popular in certainbranches of consciousness research (e.g., Penrose,1994), is unlikely to provide compelling relationshipsat the present time. In any event, in these cross-disci-plinary enterprises, we should remember that we mustinitially seek necessary rather than sufficient commu-nalities between levels of understanding.

The more quantitatively these supervenience re-lationships can be established, the more likely they areto have impact on the broader intellectual community.Indeed, experimental psychologists have taught us thatthere is practically no aspect of human experience thatcannot be quantified through appropriately con-structed scales, and psychoanalytic research shouldnot eschew these approaches simply because they arenot within their time-solidified traditions. Every ap-proach to mind has to increase the breadth of its empir-ical nets in order to capture reality.

Since as Freud asserted, all of our ideas shouldbe "open to modification and even replacement in thelight of further discoveries," I entertained the radicalnotion of discarding the "drive" concept, in practice ifnot in principle. Obviously, it has caused considerableconfusion for many. Admittedly, my own understand-ing of the concept may not be sufficient and hencesubject to a host of potential misunderstandings.Yorke gracefully clarified certain key issues, but dif-ficulties seem to remain. Some may simply be seman-tic ones, but the problem goes deeper, especially ifYorke is correct in concluding that "Freud held firmlyto the view that the nature of the drives cannot beknown." I hope that Freud only made this assertionfor his own intellectual era. The neurobiological natureof certain' 'drives," at least as I understand them froma neuroscientific view (namely, the homeostatic onesrelated to body energy, water, temperature, and sexualissues), have been clarified during the second half ofthis century to a remarkable degree of precision. Thiscould also be said for a broader conceptualization of"drive," if one is willing to view the basic emotionalsystems not only as representatives of "drive" but thevery instantiation of the concept. Since no comparableprecision has emerged in the psychoanalytic conceptu-alization of drive, I will continue to be brash enoughto advocate the more restricted use of the drive con-cept and to distribute the essential strengths of theconcept under a larger array of constructs.

The key, and seemingly insoluble, problem is thatFreud used a monolithic drive concept in ways thatcould be seen to be substantially compatible with neu-roscientific knowledge but, in the final accounting, it

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is at present incapable of being unidimensionally rec-onciled with it. Hence, I am at a loss on how to fit asize 12 foot into a size 6 shoe. Perhaps the neuroscien-tific shoe could be enlarged, but it is not clear how thatcan be achieved in empirically credible, nonstipulativeways. Even though Freudian "drive" is much largerthan the neuroscientific view of drives to which I sub-scribe, I have no doubt that there is much substanceto the broader view: Who would deny that extremehunger and thirst are all-encompassing features of themind? Who would deny that excruciating pain causesa comprehensive suffering in the mind, affecting everythought and action? However, I still suspect that, atbest, Freudian' 'drive" can only serve as a class-iden-tifier for the neuroscientific study of a diversity of keyneural processes as opposed to a label for any neurallyhomogeneous "natural kind" within the brain.

Obviously, "drives," in their broader meaning,can govern all brain and psychological activities, butneuroscientists know little about those pervasive ac-tions. Indeed, it is a great problem how we shouldscientifically speak about the various "global statecontrols" that the brain contains in abundance. It isclear that the "organic forces" for some of the neuro-science types of "drives" (e.g., thirst, hunger, sex/libido and even play) do build up in a "hydraulic-like" regulatory manner (probably by selective gene-expressions for selected neuropeptides and other neu-roactive molecules [Panksepp, 1993], as well as dy-namic morphologic/functional changes in the actualneural circuits). But at present we know of no compa-rable "pressures" for many other instinctual "drives"like separation distress, fear, or aggression (eventhough those systems can probably also be perma-nently sensitized by early experiences). In any event,I would personally tend to equate Freudian "drive"issues with the broader problem of being more clearabout the internal structure of "the id," the study ofwhich, to my way of thinking, represents a challengeto neuroscientists comparable to that which physicistshad to confront when they sought, a century ago, tobegin describing the internal structure of the atom.

We are now in a reasonably good position to be-gin conceptualizing the internal dynamics of the id, butas already discussed, I suspect that Freud's concept of"drive" will continue to haunt us unless we mold itto fit better with current neuroscientific knowledge.Perhaps mistakenly, my understanding has been thatFreud's drive concept was really a subset of the overallid structure, and it is widely recognized that Freudsaid remarkably little about the underlying details ofthe ide That was, no doubt, because he did not have

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the requisite neuroscientific knowledge. At present,maybe a broad term such as id energies would be anappropriate concept with which to start some usefulrevisionism. Indeed, "affective neuroscience" hasnow provided an empirically based set of neuropsy-chological conceptualizations by which some of thesubcomponents of the id can be more systematicallydiscussed (Panksepp, 1998a). These kinds of resolveddiscussions were not possible when the id was simplyan amorphous psychic wellspring for everything elsethat emerged along "developmental lines." By ac-cepting the existence of a variety of affective brainfunctions, we are in a much better position to describehow various "epigenetic landscapes" of the mind un-fold as organisms absorb the lessons of various lifeexperiences through the interplay of nature andnurture.

It should go without saying that the underlyingneural issues and resulting psychobehavioral functionsneed to be studied in some detail at the hard (i.e.,nomothetic) scientific level. In no way should this typeof knowledge be deemed incompatible with idio-graphic views, as long as we acknowledge that we areseeking supervenience relationships as opposed to thetypes of nothing but radical reductionism that capti-vated physics-enthralled positivists of a previous gen-eration. We now know that straightforward causalsimplicities are not likely to be found in the seeminglyinfinite complexities of the brain-mind sciences. Mostsimple psychological concepts are instantiated bymassive neural complexities.

In sum, I appreciate Yorke's lucid clarificationof Freud's views on drive. The concept contains issuesof great importance, as do the concepts of "motiva-tion" and "emotion" in psychology. Unfortunately,to the best of our current knowledge, there are nounitary substrates for any of those concepts in thebrain. In an evolutionary ontological sense, thesebroad concepts are little more than class-identifiersor "intervening variables" that help us organize ourobservations. I would not discourage anyone fromseeking to measure such entities empirically, but I sus-pect that as soon as they do, they will find multiplicity(i.e., many drives or affects), with perhaps only a gen-eralized aminergic arousal that accompanies all emo-tional states.

We should continue to aspire to "measure theimmeasurable," especially if our romantic insightssuggest there is truly something fundamental out thereto be discovered. By being willing to pursue thesegoals with nomothetic approaches, we have recentlydiscovered what we believe is a form of primitive

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laughter in "lower" animals (Panksepp and Burgdorf,1998). We suspect that an understanding of the under-lying neural circuitry may tell us a great deal aboutthe nature of human joy. Although radical work likethis is often hard to publish in conventional outlets,we are committed to describing our findings in waysthat can be replicated by others (Panksepp and Burg-dorf, in press). We are at present struggling with diffi-cult neuropsychological concepts like the SELF(Panksepp, 1998b), which may eventually lead us tosome interesting empirical measurements (Panksepp,in press). These explorations of mind are always donewith the assumption that every conclusion in scienceis provisional and "open to modification and evenreplacement in the light of further discoveries." Togrow fruitfully, modern psychoanalytic thought andresearch must embrace similar ground rules. Other-wise, it will remain isolated from the mainstream ap-proaches to mind that are presently undergoing arenaissance in our aspirations for understanding.

LeDoux's Commentary

LeDoux's cautious analysis emphasizes several poten-tial linkages between neuroscience knowledge andpsychoanalytic insights with which I generally agree.However, his brief comments on my overall viewsregarding the study of affect also serve to remind usthat there is as much controversy left within neuro-scientific levels of analysis as among the intellectualintersections of neuroscientific and psychoanalyticpoints of view. In short, neuroscientists simply do notagree how affective states are generated by the brain,and all three of the basic neuroscience commentatorsparticipating in the present discussion have offereddistinct views on the matter: (1) Damasio (1994) hassuggested that feelings are created by "somatic mark-ers," which reflect bodily changes that accompanyemotions (this is a modern variant of the James-Langeperspective, with the added recognition that body rep-resentations also exist in the brain). (2) LeDoux (1996)argues that feelings arise from various subcortical sys-tems interacting with higher "working memory" sys-tems. (3) Panksepp (1998a) suggests that feelingsemerge from the intrinsic neurodynamics of emotionalcommand systems interacting with a neurosymbolic"virtual body" depicted in the brain (perhaps mostconcentrated in the PAG), which may constitute a pri-mordial representation of "the self, ' , providing amechanism whereby basic values can interact with as-

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cending reticular activating systems that control ex-teroceptive consciousness (Panksepp, 1998b).

I suspect that all three perspectives will contrib-ute to future understandings of affective states, but itis unlikely that all will be of equal importance in anyfinal synthesis. At present, we cannot partition thevariance among these perspectives, but we can indulgein some forthright discussion of how all of the evi-dence stacks up and which avenues of research willbe most productive. Neuroscientists with divergentperspectives will need to clearly enunciate the appar-ent problems with other views and possible solutions.Through the resulting dialectics, we may eventuallybe able to reach some consensus on how to resolvecritical issues empirically. Thus, even though I amconvinced that working memory has a lot to do withhuman emotions, especially in the cognitive triggeringand regulation of affective states, I doubt if workingmemory actually creates emotional feelings and theassociated forms of action readiness. Hence, let megently challenge some of LeDoux's ideas.

As I understand it, LeDoux suggests that con-sciously experienced emotional feelings are pieces ofinformation, quite comparable to other sensorial andperceptual pieces of information, churned togetherwithin the cauldron of working memory that presum-ably creates consciousness itself. The emotional inputspresumably arise from the types of emotional com-mand circuits that I have been conceptualizing for thepast several decades, as well as from various bodilyreafferents that have been the stock in trade for theintellectual descendants of James-Lange type perspec-tives on felt emotionality. This is an eminently logicalperspective that gets around many conceptual diffi-culties (e.g., how an affect might be created by neuralprocesses within lower reaches of the brain). AlthoughI have little doubt that emotional systems constitutecore processes in memory systems, perhaps thosewhich help create various habitual psychobehavioralstructures of organisms, I think it is shortsighted tosee emotional systems simply as pieces of informationthat operate in working memory. That view leaves uswith a host of problems and dilemmas and paradoxesthat would need to be addressed coherently. Let memention half a dozen that come quickly to mind. Un-fortunately many come from folk psychology, ratherthan a systematic experimental analysis of affectiveexperience-a lacuna that only goes to show how des-perately modern cognitive-informational agendas ofbrain organization still need to be supplemented withmore pervasive affective views.

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1. The working memory hypothesis would havegreat difficulty in explaining why it is so hard to resur-rect emotional feelings simply through the act of think-ing. This has been a classic dilemma: Althoughemotions in humans are commonly caused by cogni-tive conflicts, emotions can also overwhelm us glob-ally without much prior thought. Indeed, in theabsence of the right environmental triggers, it is quitedifficult to voluntarily instigate strong emotional statesin oneself (which makes laboratory research in thearea so difficult). By comparison, it seems much easierto image the flow of everyday events that one hasexperienced in the past. Further, simply by modifyingthe mood of an individual with modern antidepres-sants, the concurrent cognitive ruminations of individ-uals commonly resolve spontaneously (Kramer, 1993).In short, in the absence of instigating world events,emotional memories appear to be remarkably weakprecipitants of affect within the "parliamentary lob-bies" of working memories. However, when passionsare aroused, they commonly prevail over thought.

2. Related to the above is the issue of why it isso hard to simply remember the felt intensity of emo-tional episodes, even though we can easily rememberthe facts that surround those episodes. I suspect thatis because felt emotions require much more neuralprocessing, of a globally embodied kind (e.g., releaseof long-acting neuropeptides through widespread brainsystems), that simply cannot be patched together byinformation transfers in higher working memory cir-cuits.

3. One of the most attractive aspects of the work-ing memory hypothesis of emotional feelings, is theneed to have neural mechanisms that can sustain feel-ings in time. However, this could also be explainedby the existence of executive molecules for emotionalarousal (e.g., various neuropeptides, which are not rap-idly degraded by enzymes), which can allow feelingsto linger as long as the molecules persist at relevantsynapses (Panksepp, 1993). My reading of the avail-able evidence is that many of the relevant synapses arequite low within the neuroaxis (Panksepp, 1998a,b).Cognitive views of emotion often tend to disregardthis arena of research, perhaps because those types ofneural influences are hard to conceptualize in termsof rapid cognitive-type information flow.

4. If working memory were critical for generat-ing affect (as opposed to just regulating affect), weshould be able to evoke affective feelings quite readilyby direct neural activation (e.g., electrical stimulation)of working memory tissues, but that is not the case.The strongest affective experiences and corresponding

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behaviors in humans, as in animals, are evoked bydirect electrical stimulation of subcortical emotionalcircuits (Panksepp, 1985; Gloor, 1997). The specificstimulation sites in humans and animals match re-markably well. Although one could claim that theseaffects are achieved only because we are stimulatingthe input systems to working memory, that remainsan enormous supposition. If that were simply the case,direct stimulation of working memory fields shouldproduce stronger affective effects than has yet beenachieved.

More recently, there has been some success inglobal activation of frontal areas of the brain withrapid Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS;George, Kettner, Kimbrell, Steedman, and Post, 1996),but because of the strong connectivities of frontalbrain areas with emotion integrators of the PAG(Shipley, Ennis, Rizvi, and Behbehani, 1991), it re-mains possible that those affective effects require sub-cortical patterns of arousal to be recruited. In myestimation, it remains most likely that lower systemsin the brain, especially areas such as the PAG andsurrounding tectal and tegmental tissues, are essentialfor creating the fundamental neurodynamics that con-stitute affective consciousness (Panksepp, 1998b).

Of course, the full mental spectrum of an emo-tional episode must recruit an enormous amount ofthe brain, including, most certainly, working memorytissues of the frontal lobes (Goldman-Rakic, 1995),but I believe those tissues primarily help regulate andchannel emotional episodes. It is an obvious fact ofhuman life that when an emotional state has beenaroused, the mind has great difficulty in dwelling onanything else than how to resolve the affective tension,whether via truthful, existential actions in the worldor the many deceits and subterfuges in which the hu-man mind becomes so skilled. i also believe that thisis where repression mechanisms enter if the emotionalconflicts are too large for straightforward cognitiveprocesses to resolve. It may be more adaptive to sup-press some of the ideas and feelings that cannot beaccommodated in waking life than to continue to dwellon them. In dreaming, as frontal lobe inhibition dimin-ishes, such repressed .material may leak out both af-fectively as well as cognitively (i.e., symbolically). Itseems to me that those cognitive--emotional strategiesand interactions may require a great deal of neurocom-putational space, but I would be surprised if they actu-ally create feelings rather than using them as an artistuses paint. In other words, there appears to be no sus-tained line of evidence to suggest that the fundamentalintegrative mechanisms for emotional feelings reside

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in those higher brain tissues that generate ideas andexternal perceptions.

5. If cortical working memory were so importantin generating affective feelings, we would expect fron-tal cortical damage to have much more dramatic ef-fects on the capacity of individuals to get emotionallyaroused.. If anything, the evidence suggests that hu-mans and animals that have suffered frontal damageget emotionally aroused more easily than before. Al-though their emotional episodes are psychologicallymore shallow and of shorter durations (suggesting achildlike lack of regulation by cognitive delibera-tions), this only affirms the importance of higher brainareas in sustaining the object-related patterning ofemotions in space and time. In other words, frontallobe damage diminishes the desire and ability of indi-viduals to dwell on their emotional troubles in com-plex and persistent ways. In contrast, damage to limbiccortical and subcortical areas has much more dramaticand sustained effects on the emotional arousal of ani-mals and humans (Panksepp, 1985; Gloor, 1997).

6. If the basic emotional feelings were createdfrom working memory, we might expect adults to havemuch stronger emotional feelings than children. It iswell established that young children cannot maintaininformation in working memory as readily as adults,but it seems evident that they also become emotionallyaroused more easily, albeit for shorter periods, thanadults. This highlights an issue on which LeDoux andI agree-working memories help sustain and regulateemotions in time and space, often in inhibitory, repres-sive ways, perhaps via direct connections to the moreprimitive emotion-generating systems of the brainstem (Shipley, Ennis, Rizvi, and Behbehani, 1991).Higher brain areas surely blend and modify basic emo-tions so as to markedly increase the subtlety and com-plexity of emotional life, giving us. the ability to havecognitive types of feelings like sh:ame, guilt~ and jeal-ousy. However, to my knowledge there is at presentno evidence that the affective qualities of those moresubtle socially constructed feelings are created withinthe cortical working-memory banks of the brain. Per-haps only the naturally associated thoughts of thosesocially derived emotional states require workingmemory.

In sum, working memory has a great deal to doonce emotions are aroused. It helps us ruminate onthe various conflicts of life, to formulate plans fordealing with emotional episodes, for blending the in-formation from specific circumstances with possibleregulatory maneuvers, and for many other importantinteractions between internal emotional feelings and

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the cognitive details of real life events. It is a majorplace where ego- and superego-type functions asserttheir influence. It seems to me excessive to put theadditional burden of creating the basic feelings onthese higher brain processes, especially when abun-dant evidence suggests that the lower processessuffice.

Although LeDoux admits to being ambivalentabout the "affective neuroscience" view, he has alsoexplicitly recognized that historically behaviorism andthe rise of cognitive psychology tended to retard workon emotions. However, his own influential perspec-tives may now be delaying the emergence of a broadand realistic view of emotions-----one that does not sim-ply accept the traditional cognitive neuroscience as-sumption that everything of psychological importancein the brain reduces ultimately to information pro-cessing that can be simulated by digital algorithms. Infact, to really understand emotions and moods, wemay need to cultivate conceptions that deal with prim-itive global state variables, which are far more embod-ied and fundamentally analog, than is easy to envisionin traditional information-theoretic terms. Perhapsthat is one reason cognitive science is having suchdifficulty in conceptualizing the nature of primary-process consciousness in the brain. At its roots, pri-mary-process consciousness may be fundamentally af-fective.

If the basic emotional feelings turn out to reflectglobal-state processes of the brain, as an increasingnumber of investigators believe (e.g., see Watt, 1998,for recent, in-depth discussion), then we may needaffective neuroscience as a healthy sibling, rather thanas an impoverished foster child, within the grandscheme of a comprehensive brain-mind science thatmany of us are trying to build. Emotions may have alogic of their own (some call it an irrationality) whichis distinct from that normally seen in cognitive sys-tems. Certainly bottom-up "affective neuroscience"is not intended simply as an antidote to cognitiveviews, but as an equal working partner with the moreestablished top-down cognitive perspectives to mind.I believe the affective view also permits much strongercoordination of research strategies and priorities tohuman psychiatric issues. Thus, while cognitive-me-morial approaches to mind are more likely to illumi-nate the superego-type emotion regulatory aspects ofmind, the basic emotional-affective program perspec-tives are more likely to illuminate the id func-tions-the genetically provided internal value systemsof an organism-where major psychopathologies aremore likely to emerge.

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In short, despite its exquisitely simple logic, Ifind it difficult to mesh corticocentric and computa-tional ideas of affect generation with a great deal of theempirical evidence accumulated during the twentiethcentury (Panksepp, 1998a). The idea that the globallyexperienced affective states of the nervous systemscould simply be informational consequences of thehighest memorial reaches of the brain appears to yieldvarious conceptual paradoxes, which may be most eas-ily solved if we view a rudimentary form of affectiveconsciousness to be a fundamental and an embodiedproperty of brain stem circuits in action (Panksepp,1998a,b).

A vigorous dialectic between affective and cogni-tive approaches may be healthy for enhancing intellec-tual progress in understanding the fundamental natureof emotions and how they interact with higher mentalprocesses. The ancient evolutionary processes that es-tablished priorities in the brain, prior to the emergenceof more subtle and sophisticated cognitive abilities,are just being conceptualized in neuroscience for thefirst time (e.g., Panksepp, 1998a; Watt, 1998). To slaythe' 'affective neuroscience" infant at this early stageof development, without fully dealing with its prem-ises, will, I believe, only help further retard the devel-opment and implementation of the types of novelresearch strategies (which focus on the global integ-rative functions of the brain) that have a substantivechance of clarifying the deeper neurobiological pro-cesses of brain systems that create affects, affectivedisorders, primary-process consciousness, and hencemany of the shared features of human and animal na-tures.

Green's Commentary

I was moved by Green's passion to maintain Freudiantraditions in their original form, resembling LeDoux'sdesire to keep affective issues out of animal behavioralbrain research. This reflects a key human di-lemma-how do we refurbish and refresh intellectualtraditions that offer some powerful insights but lackthe wherewithal to convince the rest of the scientificworld that the insights truly reflect animate reality.In the act of censoring his own Project, Freud surelyrealized that neurobiological knowledge of his timecould not convince others of the clarity of his vision.Still, he believed in that clarity, and he left us a psy-chology that, in order to survive as a scientific tradi-tion, must now establish empirically defensiblesupervenience relationships with modern neurosci-

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ence. Conversely, neuroscience must try to deal withpsychological subtleties for which its tools are ill-pre-pared. The establishment of relationships betweenmental views and neural views will be the most diffi-cult theoretical task that both neuroscientific and psy-choanalytic thought must face. Too many on bothsides are still willing to deny that such relationshipscan or should be sought. Having been a participant atthe Society for Neuroscience meetings since its inau-gural gathering in 1971, I realize how resistant neuro-scientists remain to even discussing the existence ofpsychologically meaningful global-state variables inthe brain. In a sense, Green's commentary reflects acomparable type of denial from the other side.

Thus, I resonate in perplexity with Green's frus-tration when he says "almost everything Freud wroteseems in fact doubtful in the light of neuroscience."I choose to take this declamation tongue-in-cheek, aswas my juxtapositioning of E. O. Wilson's (1998) callfor consilience with his rather harsh and unconcilia-tory quote concerning Freud's theory. Perhaps Greenmissed my intent in using that quote, and my intenton some other key issues as well. My highlighting ofthe Freudian drive concept was to help emphasize thetypes of problems we must face in trying to retain, intheir original form, all the insights that Freud shared.At the risk of repeating my response to Yorke, let meagain emphasize that something like "drive" surelyexists in the brain. However, in the crucible of neuro-science it may fragment into many subsidiary pro-cesses, so that it only becomes a class-identifier like"motivation," retaining no more unified brain sub-stance (at least at the neuroscientific level) than manyother psychological concepts. In other words, all toomany of the concepts of psychology are the culturalcreations of our minds rather than the creations ofnature. I, like the young Freud, am much more inter-ested in the latter, and believe that will provide a solidfoundation for understanding the former. Of course,there is no final word on any of these questions, somy aim was only to highlight the types of concerns wemust face if there is to be any substantive consiliencebetween psychoanalysis and neuroscience. It is a ma-jor conceptual dilemma on both sides. If most arestruggling with learning and various cultural inven-tions while only a few are focusing on the neurallyingrained nature of evolutionary processes within thebrain, we will miss many opportunities for fruitful hy-bridization. The idea that there are important relation-ships to be clarified among very different levels ofanalysis is one that we must learn to cultivate amongall the relevant views.

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In neuroscience, we at present find ourselves inthe rather awkward position where many investigatorsstill deny (at a logical level) the potential causal effi-cacy of emotional feelings in the governance of animalbehavior. In contrast, as Solms and Nersessian havehighlighted in their synopsis of Freud's theory, psy-choanalytic thought is impossible without affectiveconcepts. Thus, some of the major bridges betweenthe two would presumably arise from our conceptionsof how emotional feelings actually emerge from brainmatter, and it is hard to imagine that these kinds ofmechanisms can be revealed without animal research(see Panksepp, in press, for an in-depth discussion ofsuch issues). At present, we need to establish measur-able relationships between affective states and neuraldynamics. Scientifically, this is a nightmarish problemsince the brain mechanisms we must understand canonly be readily studied in animals, but obviously ani-mals cannot give us verbal reports of their feelings(even though some of us believe that the emotionalsounds they make, as well as various other behaviors,can inform us of those states). My proposed strategyis to put the study of behavioral changes, brain func-tions, and psychological processes on an equal footing,and to see if a theoretical triangulation among theselines of evidence can reveal credible predictive rela-tionships across species. I believe the results are prom-ising (Panksepp, 1998a). Indeed, I believe this strategywill work even in the unlikely possibility that mostother mammals have no feelings: An understanding oftheir instinctual emotional behavior systems will stillinform us of the underlying causes of human feelings.

As Green emphasizes, this triangulation strategycan only work for certain processes. Obviously, wecannot, in animals, study specific mental contents andgeneral psychological processes for which they haveno relevant brain substrates. Thus, we will have littlesuccess in studying shame and guilt in rats. Indeed,some still believe that we will not have much successin studying practically any of their affective feelings,since feelings may emerge from higher frontal corticalregions which are quite paltry in most of the animalscommonly used in behavioral neuroscience research(see LeDoux's commentary). Of course, I disagreewith that dire an assessment, and I think the evidenceaffirms that the primal executive controls for affectivemental qualities emerge largely from lower reaches ofthe brain, which should allow us to establish robustsupervenience relationships between human affectiveexperience and behavioral brain research in animals(e.g., see Berridge and Robinson, 1998; Schultz,1998). Fortunately, this is an empirically resolvable

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issue, but only if we allow certain animal behaviorsto provisionally constitute valid self-reports of internalpsychodynamics. Indeed, as already mentioned, astudy of vocalizations may be an outstanding way toget reasonably accurate self-reports of emotional feel-ings (Panksepp, 1981; Panksepp, Newman and Insel,1992; Knutson, Panksepp, and Burgdorf, 1998a). Thepursuit of such theoretical vistas may open up subtleterritories of animal mind for empirical investigation.I am delighted that Green resonated with my prelimi-nary and highly conjectural struggle to conceptualizethe SELF, and would indicate that this idea is morefully developed in Panksepp (1998b).

At early stages of these pursuits, some illuminat-ing metaphors may help us to penetrate the darkness.However, the dialectic of theory and evidence mustlead to a modification and refinement of our meta-phors. Perhaps Freud's drive concept was such a semi-nal concept, but now it needs to be refreshed in variousneuroscientific ways. As already discussed, only inthis practical sense do I feel that the overall conceptof drive may have become superfluous.

I am committed to the view that important pre-dictive relationships between basic mental and brainprocesses can be established through behavioral brainresearch. Many other investigators, perhaps the major-ity in behavioral neuroscience, still remain uncon-vinced of, and at times hostile to, this kind ofperspective. Green also is dubious of this venture.That is regrettable from my utilitarian perspective. Ithink the single most important joint problem for bothneuroscience and psychoanalysis is to provide a trueand lasting understanding of affective processes andtheir fundamental role in behavior and the nature ofconsciousness. I personally do not think those goalscan be achieved without animal brain research or avigorous attempt to make first-person experiencesopen to analysis by third-person approaches. The typesof knowledge that can be harvested at the present timefrom kindred creatures and cooperative humans, espe-cially if our wark is permeated by a simple and naturalcross-species and cross-individual humanism, arebound to have profound and beneficial influences forthe emergence of a deeply scientific psychology aswell as on clinical practice-psychoanalytic, biopsy-chiatric, and otherwise.

Damasio's Commentary

The constructive remarks by Damasio promote thekind of attitude that should be increasingly cultivated

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in neuroscience if we are ever going to understandemotions. In Damasio's view, as in my own, "theemotions are genomically present and largely innate"(although they are developmentally modified in vari-ous ways, most obviously by learning). He challengesneuroscientists to start with the premise "that complexnonhuman creatures have feelings" -an attitudewhich, as already highlighted, has not been cultivatedin behavioral neuroscience. He emphasizes the im-mensity of the work that lies ahead of us if we aregoing to really understand emotions and interface ourfindings with other intellectual traditions such as psy-chological and psychoanalytic thought. He focuses asmuch on the subtle but important representations ofthe body within the brain as well as the organic inputsto the brain from the corporeal soma.

Our ability to distinguish these kinds of inter-acting dynamics, partitioning the influence of each inthe creation of affect, will be an important chapter forfuture emotion research. Although some work withpatients having high spinal cord injuries indicates thatthe intensity of certain emotional feelings is influencedby bodily states (Hohmann, 1966), the basic ability tohave emotional feelings remains intact. This suggeststhat bodily inputs to emotions may largely be quantita-tive rather than qualitative, even though the entericnervous system certainly provides enough complexityfor us to entertain more specific functions for the vis-cera in the instigation and regulation of moods (Gers-hon, 1998). Indeed, it must be emphasized that thiscomplexity of reticulating circuits and neuropeptidechemistries is matched within the visceral-limbic tis-sues of the brain. It is especially through the study ofthese neuromodulatory peptide systems that we arebeginning to see the glimmers of specific emotionalsystems that have enormous implications for under-standing normal affective processes as well as theirvarious imbalances (Panksepp, 1993, 1998a).

Damasio discourages neophrenological attemptsto simplify complex issues, for they may only providethe illusion of understanding. At the same time, itneeds to be emphasized that certain brain circuits andcertain neurochemistries are much more important formediating specific emotions than others. Thus, eventhough the whole brain is certainly involved in emo-tions, there are executive structures that are essentialfor synchronizing specific emotional tendencies. Re-cent brain imaging work on anger from Damasio'sown lab highlights the importance of subcortical andlower brain stem structures in elaborating the experi-ence of this emotion (Damasio et aI., 1998). In orderto make further progress, we need discrete, simplified

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hypotheses that can be confirmed or disconfirmed.Otherwise important empirical work will be impeded.However, we should not delude ourselves that an un-derstanding of the essential executive structures beginsto fully depict the consequences of emotions as theypercolate, perhaps chaotically, through many brain ar-eas, as well as individual lives and cultural activities.The neuroscience work in animals can only clarify thenecessary substrates of mammalian emotions; it haslittle to say about what is sufficient to construct themany other complexities of our emotional lives. Psy-choanalytic theught is much more attuned to those en-deavors.

We will gradually have to develop conceptualstructures that can handle the full complexity of emo-tions in the brain, and we may eventually have to im-plement dynamic systems approaches to the study ofemotions (Freeman, 1995; Lewis and Granic, inpress.) At that level, there has been much talk butlittle empirical action; adequate data sets for nonlinearanalyses are notoriously difficult to harvest (see Pank-sepp, in press). In pursuing such difficult computa-tional goals, we should also remember that it is equallyimportant to have accurate depth psychological de-scriptions of individual lives and to study how earlyexperiences lead to different life trajectories. In anyevent, Damasio encourages us to clearly envision themagnitude of the empirical and conceptual tasks be-fore us. We are like children, playing on the shores ofyet unimagined complexities and confronted by depthsthat will take many generations of arduous researchto fathom. Our ideas, like our modern PET and MRIimages of the functioning human brain, are like car-toon toys that barely resemble reality. Accordingly,we must remain open to new ideas even as we cultivatecritical attitudes in our evaluation of the evidence.

As Yorke emphasized more than anyone in thesediscussions, Freud would also have agreed that in ourattempts to understand the internal dynamics of the idand the resulting affective complexities, the doors tofurther understanding, most especially a neuroscien-tific understanding, should never be closed. Freud qui-etly sustained his love affair with the brain throughouthis life, but only occasionally explicitly proclaimedhis continued devotion to the Project (1950): "Thetheoretical structure of psychoanalysis that we havecreated is in truth a superstructure, which will one dayhave to be set upon its organic foundation. But we arestill ignorant of this" (Freud, 1916-1917, p. 389, ascited by Kitcher, 1992, p. 53). It is a pity that Freuddid not continue to link his thinking credibly to theemerging findings of neuroscience, but we are now in

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a much better position to do just that. Thus, it would bea greater pity if we do not capitalize on the wonderfulopportunities that are available to us.

Affects and Levels of Scientific Analysis

Ultimately, the only way we recognize the importanceof affective states in living processes is through ourhuman ability to subjectively experience emotionalfeelings and to communicate them to others. This isthe level at which psychoanalysis excels, althoughthere is abundant room for empirical development.Unfortunately, the experiential level only informs usof the existence and importance of certain brain pro-cesses, it tells us very little about the types of brainmechanisms which help create those states of being.The latter are bound to be much more complex thanthe former. The issue of what is the most fruitful levelof synthesis for linking these levels of analysis, fortruly understanding emotions, is rarely discussed inmodern science.

As one could easily document, much of present-day cognitive-type emotion research is working in thetraditional millisecond time-frames of classical condi-tioning. Cognitive science is entranced with responselatencies, which can be subjected to computationalmodeling, while ignoring the much longer ruminativetime-frames in which the real-life emotions and affect-generating neuropeptides operate. This skews our re-search enterprises and understanding of essential is-sues in dramatic ways. Thereby, brain scholars wholike to think in the time-frames of synaptic latencies,all to often tend to ignore many other fertile ap-proaches to understanding emotions, from autobio-graphic to zoophilic. Although action potentials surelyhelp stitch together the representational aspects ofmental activity, that is not as clear for the more ancientfabric of mind that appears to generate primary-pro-cess affect. At these lower reaches we may need moreintegrative global concepts (focusing on the widelybroadcast, population dynamics of nerve cells) in orderto comprehend what the brain tissues are doing.

To understand how emotions truly operate, wemust learn to think and work within the more tidalhormonal and paracrine time-frames within which ourmoods and other organic bodily processes normallyoperate. Indeed, in my estimation the neuroscientificanalytic level that has the greatest potential for in-terfacing with human emotional issues is the study ofhow the brain neurochemical systems, shared by allmammals, function to create mood states (Panksepp,

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1993). Also, as noted, an empirical focus on the coor-dinated activities of subcortical cell ensembles ratherthan the firing rates of individual neurons may turnout to be the most informative for understanding howemotional integration and affective states are gener-ated by neural tissues. Indeed, the sustained dendriticpotentials from large groups of neurons, reflected inEEG measurements, still has great potential to clarifyemotional neurodynamics (Panksepp and Bekkedal,1997), even though the issue of how electrodes needto be oriented within relevant systems and how theexceedingly rich data streams need to be computation-ally handled remain to be resolved (Panksepp, inpress).

I do not think it can be overemphasized that therehas been an enormous bias during the twentieth cen-tury to view practically everything of importance inthe mind as being constructed from the projectile expe-riences and memories of organisms. This is becausehumans and other mammals are obviously informa-tion hungry organisms with a great capacity to remem-ber what has happened to them. Although anunderstanding of memory formation is essential forunderstanding most major psychological issues (ex-plaining the popularity of that focus), it is not simplythrough memorial abilities that most animals survivedduring the early evolutionary emergence of mind, es-pecially when the instinctive (periconscious?) emotioncoordinating systems of the brain stem first evolved.The refinement of rapid-fire cortical and cerebellarresponse abilities, presumably became highly usefulonly when the values represented by more global be-havioral-state capacities had already emerged inbrain evolution.

To some extent the millisecond view of tradi-tional cognitive psychology is being countered bymodern evolutionary views, but even those new ap-proaches have yet to come to terms with the geneti-cally provided, global-state epistemology of the lowerreaches of the nervous system. The critical issue forunderstanding affect is simply: What is the most accu-rate conception of all the relevant underlying neuralorganizations? If both humans and other animals sharesimilar primitive brain substrates for organizing neuro-biological values, even though we are not yet able toempirically monitor the resulting internally experi-enced affects directly, we must still try to implementthe indirect strategies that are available to us (Pank-sepp, in press). Too many neuroscientists remain skep-tical of the potential fruitfulness of these possibilitieson the basis of a traditional denial of emotional sen-tience to other animals (e.g., Budiansky, 1998). I think

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we need to move past such perennial and epistemolog-ically unresolvable polarities to accepting multiplepoints of view as logically reasonable and pluralisti-cally desirable starting points for our inquiries, andthereby to integrate all of the fruits of our variousresearch endeavors.

To my way of thinking, the critical issue iswhether credible predictions-both of human feelingsfrom animal behavior, and conversely, animal behav-iors from a careful analysis of human feelings-eanbe made by accepting the potential reality of animalfeelings. On the basis of a great deal of research, Ibelieve they can (Panksepp, 1998a), and emergingnew strategies to treat psychiatric disorders are af-firming this view (Panksepp, 1995; Kramer et aI.,1998). If it were not for the existence of deep neuralhomologies and our ability to access human subjectiveexperience through verbal self-reports, then I wouldnot be willing to speak of affective processes in otheranimals. If no cross-species predictions could be madein the broad arena of affective processes, especiallyfrom the neural causes of animal emotional behaviorsto the causes of human feelings, then all of us whohave a commitment to the scientific worldview, mightbe best advised to abide by the traditional type of sci-entific skepticism that many neuroscientists continueto advocate. If, on the other hand, we find that ouremerging knowledge concerning certain brain circuitsand neuromolecules help us to generate reasonablyaccurate predictions from animal behaviors to humanfeelings (which has certainly been my overriding ex-perimental g