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Response to Ongoing Discussion (Vol. 1, No. 1) byJaak Panksepp
(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 (2001) Response to Ongoing
Discussion (Vol. 1, No. 1) by Jaak Panksepp (BowlingGreen, Ohio),
Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal for
Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences, 3:1, 75-81,DOI:
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75
ONGOING DISCUSSION
Response to Ongoing Discussion (Vol. 1, No.1) by Jaak Panksepp
(Bowling Green, Ohio)
My apologies for the delay in responding to all theinteresting
comments directed at material presentedin the first issue of
Neuro-Psychoanalysis. I was stillwaiting for the last of the
promised commentaries, butthe editors finally suggested that I
proceed without it.So let me simply take the various comments in
thechronological order they were submitted. Commenta-tors
elaborated on a remarkable number of interestingpoints, but because
of the massive time constraints thatmost of us feel during these
electronically liberated/imprisoned days, I will only address
issues that wererather directly pertinent to my own comments
(al-though at times I could not resist elaborating on someothers).
Indeed, the majority of comments were notdirectly related to my own
remarks, so the editors maywish to add comments of their own.
Comment by Howard Shevrin (Vol. 1, No.2)Howard Shevrin raised
the important issue of howwe might distinguish motivation and
affect, with thesuggestion that I may have conflated them a bit
toomuch. He suggests that my so-called SEEKING sys-tem has "a kind
of amorphous affect state with a cer-tain indefinable 'oomph' " and
continues that "thisdoes not seem to be the way Berridge and
Robinson(1995) describe the craving system they have identi-fied
and which Panksepp uses as a basis for his SEEK-ING system" (p.
247). First, let me clarify that myviews, which in fact antedate
theirs by at least a dozenyears, were first summarized in papers in
1981, 1982,and 1986 (indeed the first attempt to publish this
per-spective of the brain "reward/reinforcement system"was
submitted to Psychological Reviews in 1977 andsoundly rejected for
being 'just-so' neuro-psycholo-
Jaak Panksepp is Distinguished Research Professor of
Psychobiology,Emeritus, Department of Psychology, Bowling Green
State University,Ohio.
gizing"). However, now it is the type of view that isprevailing,
with a variety of variants (for a recent re-view see Ikemoto and
Panksepp [1999]). In any event,our conception of the SEEKING
sensorimotor com-mand system is quite a bit broader than the
Berridgeand Robinson view, which can be encapsulated in theconcept
of incentive salience, and hence is largely asensoricentric view of
brain dopamine function. Oursincludes motor, autonomic, and deep
psychoaffectiveintegrative components. Of course, when we come
tosuch deep evolutionary systems, which are much morewidely
represented than a single neurochemical cir-cuit, we have to try to
find concepts that approximatethe broad integrative functions of
the system. Obvi-ously, a single type of semantic conceptualization
willnever suffice.
I will not summarize the history of this concepthere (especially
since we have done that quite thor-oughly in Ikemoto and Panksepp
[1999]), but wouldhighlight that our view is very consistent with
the Rob-inson and Berridge view, but is substantially broaderin
scope. The SEEKING system is seen to containcommand influences for
regulating reward related per-ceptions (incentive salience, as
subfunctions of theSEEKING system-comprised of some mixture
ofemotional system criteria numbers 1, 3, 5, and 6 inFigure 3.3 of
Affective Neuroscience [1998]) but alsocoherent behavioral,
autonomic, and affective pro-cesses. Hence, I believe the sensory
modulation (in-centive salience) produced by this emotional
systemis only a subset of the whole story. I see the fundamen-tal
role of this whole emotional operating system asconstituting a
coherent way for organisms to projectappetitive, foraging, seeking,
positive expectancy be-haviors into the world. It has many
interesting sensori-hedonic consequences that have barely been
analyzedin humans. In my estimation, the only reason the
Ex-pectancy/SEEKING system view I tried to push for-ward in the
late 1970s and early 1980s did not takehold much earlier, was
simply because Roy Wise in
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1982 chose to take so many of his colleagues downthe yellow
brick road of simple-minded hedonismonce more, but now that type of
simple hedonism hasbeen rejected, simply because it led to so many
empiri-cal and conceptual paradoxes.
In my view, affect and motivation are so inte-grally
intertwined, that conceptual separation of them,which is quite easy
at the semantic level, will be quiteimpossible at the neural level.
Now to get to Shevrin'smain point that the "craving" that can be
caused bythis system can be independent of positive affect. Ihave
no problem with that, but that dissociation mayreflect the chaotic
"too muchness" that this systemcan also mediate. I think this may
largely reflect thelikelihood that many emotional operating systems
op-erate affectively not only in curvilinear ways (e.g.,inverted
U), but also dynamically in various opponent-process ways. Hence
the interactions of the SEEKINGsystem with many other emotional
systems in real lifecan yield an enormous number of affects, and I
thinksome of the excellent examples that Shevrin raisesmay be
explained by such interactions. It would con-stitute an
inordinately long theoretical exercise for meto get into
speculative examples here, but I wouldsimply emphasize that along
with Robinson and Ber-ridge, we have never viewed the affect of
this systemto be any simple type of a "pleasurable" affect, atleast
in the consummatory-response sense. Rather, atlow levels it
mediates positive interest and at highlevels an insistent and not
at all delightful urge. Inlong discussion with Robinson and
Berridge, we havenot yet found a useful way to distinguish our two
con-ceptions, except that mine tends to be more inclusiveby
incorporating behavioral and autonomic synchro-nizing processes as
essential components of the sys-tem. Thus, when Shevrin says that
"affect andmotivation are separate mental events and have sepa-rate
neurophysiological instantiations" (p. 247), mygeneral response
would be that it is much too early inthe neuroscience game to make
such claims. Althoughat a high corticocognitive level one can parse
suchconcepts easily, and sometimes usefully, at the
basicsubcortical level, these concepts are going to blendseamlessly
together, and I do not know of a researchprogram that has
unambiguously distinguished them,even though there are various
human brain imagingexamples where the two appear to have been
distin-guished (for overview, see Ikemoto and Panksepp[1999, pp.
28-31]). Certainly the dynamics of thesesystems have many
unconscious, conscious and poten-tially conscious aspects, and all
of that will requirecareful human research, probably largely
pharmaco-
Jaak Panksepp
logical, carried out in various interesting contexts.However,
when we distinguish such entities at a highcognitive level, I think
we may also be encounteringvarious types of repressions where
higher levels of themind tend to try to dominate over lower
features bydenying their importance-perhaps in the way that isseen
in parietal neglect (Kaplan-Solms and Solms,2000). I very much
agree with Shevrin's assertion thatthe "objectless character of
Panksepp's SEEKINGsystem might be combined with the
psychoanalyticconception of drive" (p. 247) but with the number
ofother apparent' 'drives" the nervous system generates(at least
using the terms in the way they are commonlyemployed in my field),
that type of linking of conceptscould all too easily become
confusing and counterpro-ductive. In short, I suspect that we need
to refine manyof our traditional concepts at both psychological
andneurological levels, conjointly, before we can reallycommunicate
effectively between disciplinary bound-aries. Thus, I see many of
Shevrin's comments, intel-lectually coherent within one
disciplinary framework,to be troublesome within another, and vice
versa. Ipersonally believe that the best conceptions willemerge
when we begin to combine depth psychologi-cal and precise
neuropharmacological manipulationsin carefully selected human
models where emotionalstates can be systematically aroused.
Unfortunately,that era of psychoethological investigations
hasbarely begun.
Shevrin also makes a variety of interesting com-ments regarding
the views of the other participants inthe debates, but I will not
attempt any further analysisof those interesting issues. As Shevrin
emphasizes, aswe begin to approach many of these issues
empiri-cally, especially the unconscious ones, we are boundto have
many surprises. Indeed, we are now collabo-rating on a project in
an effort to monitor affect as itelaborates during subliminal
presentation of emotionalwords, and we are already finding effects
that neitherof us would have predicted. The empirical complexi-ties
are bound to put all of our simple integrative theo-ries to
shame-and I am ready for many surpriseswhen people start to
investigate how the SEEKINGsystem interacts with different
temperaments in vari-ous environments.
Comment by Clifford Yorke (Vol. 1, No.2)Clifford Yorke has
provided us with a superlative de-scription of the psychoanalytic
setting, and clarifiesthe difficulties entailed in imposing
psychophamaceu-
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Ongoing Discussion (Vol. 1. No.1)
tical manipulations onto this relationship. My advo-cacy of the
psychopharmaceutical approach was basedlargely on the view that the
psychoanalytic procedure,perhaps shortened and modified in various
ways,would be an ideal way to approach the neurologicalbasis of the
psychoethology of mind. I was probablya bit emphatic, and hence
misleading, on how thismight be best done, but I do see the need to
developexperimental ways to implement new psychoanalyticprocedures
rather than imposing anything along theselines on clients. Of
course, if clients wished to befully informed collaborators in the
explorations of thehuman mind, that would be another story.
Obviously,most of the experimental work would have to be doneon
"normal" volunteers, who have the introspectivedepth to be willing
and competent reporters of theinner life. I also think that
completely new depth psy-chological procedures (both in terms of
various inde-pendent variables which can systematically
evokeemotional responses and new dependent variables thatattempt to
access the inner life) need to be developedin order for such
neuromental investigations to pro-ceed. These methodological issues
need a great dealof attention for such projects to materialize. At
thisjuncture, I would simply indicate that vigorous discus-sions of
such topics have taken place in the conscious-ness community
recently, and those wishing to studypast discussions can check out
Watt (1998, http:/ /server.phil.vt.edu/assc/watt/default.html) and
Nielsenand Kazniak (1999,
http://www.consciousness.arizo-na.edu/emotion/library.html). Yorke
expressed lessenthusiasm for the procedures of "academic
psychol-ogy" with its abundance of "rating scales." I cansimply
indicate that I am enormously disenchantedwith many of those
techniques also, since so many ofthem handle human mental life
superficially. How-ever, many of them are effective rapid screening
toolsthat may allow you to get to the right moments in time,where a
much deeper psychological and neurologicalanalysis needs to be
done. We all agree that the empir-ical challenges facing us are
enormous!
Letter from Mortimer Ostow
(http://www.neuro-psa.com/ostow.htm)As much as perhaps anyone
else.in the psychoanalyticcommunity, Mortimer Ostow recognizes the
promiseof psychopharmacological interventions in clarifyingthe
dynamics of the human mind. I am especially de-lighted by the
extent to which he resonates with theintroduction of the SEEKING
system into our thinking
77
(also see Howard Shevrin's comments above). It istruly
remarkable how long this conceptual reorienta-tion has taken
(largely because of the conceptualblinders imposed on people
actually doing the relevantempirical work by the era of radical
behaviorism).For a long time investigators were discouraged
fromutilizing concepts that reflect intrinsic mind-brain
pro-cesses, to the point where they could not see patternsof
relationships that were staring them in the face. Iagree with Ostow
when he sees that the study of thisone system "is extraordinarly
promising" and can beused as a test case for the fertility of
concepts at theborderland of neuroscience and psychoanalysis.Proper
conceptualization of the "appetitive mode"has enormous implications
for understanding mentallife. I also very much agree with Ostow's
assertionthat "the study of affect would profit from a
usefultaxonomy" and I would only indicate that my bookAffective
Neuroscience (1998) was an effort to dealonly with the major
intrinsic systems that relatedclearly to psychiatric disorders-and
as Ostow empha-sizes, the biggest ticket item is probably the
wholespectrum of "attachment processes," which until re-cently has
had no acknowledged neural foundations.That has changed
dramatically in the last two decades.Ostow proceeds: "Panksepp
relates all of these to theanterior cingulate gyrus in location and
to oxytocin asthe transmitter," and I would simply emphasize
thatthis is a small part of the overall circuitry that containsan
abundance of many other chemistries and brainareas, especially
brain opioid, prolactin and areas suchas the bed nucleus of the
stria-terminalis, septal nuclei,as well as descending components in
midthalamic andintralaminar areas and the periventricular and
peria-queductal gray zones (Nelson and Panksepp, 1998).He proceeds
that we must recognize "the heterogene-ity of the members of the
class [of affects] and thedifferences in behavior among them."
Indeed, thereare many background affects in our lives that no
onehas yet conceptualized in neuroscientific terms-af-fects such
"as awe, wonder, humor, a feeling of theuncanny, the feeling called
the oceanic feeling" toname only a few. The fact that affect when
modulatedpharmacologically can modify mental dynamics wasalso
highlighted. Ostow emphasizes a key difficulty inour resulting
attempts to study affect: "The patientwho has been depressed and
has been successfullytreated with antidepression medication is no
longerdepressed and no longer entertains depressivethoughts. In
fact his memory for depression is not verystrong and he has very
little interest in retrieving thethoughts that he had when
depressed." Ostow is
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78
among the forward looking psychoanalysts to explic-itly
emphasize a key fact: "Those of us who haveworked with medication
find that its successful usefacilitates rather than impedes
analysis."
Essay by Alan Schore (Vol. 1,
No.1;www.neuro-psa.comlschore.htm)Alan has provided us with a
superlative overview ofthe role of brain lateralization issues for
understandingthe organization and development of affective
pro-cesses in the brain (sharing a preliminary version ofa
manuscript for his upcoming Affect Regulation andthe Repair of the
Self. [http://www.neuro-psa.com/Schore.htm]). I have also recently
shared my thoughtson laterality issues in this venue (see my
response toWhittle's article for the second issue of the journal
athttp://neuro-psa.com/pank.htm). My essay can beseen as one that
complements concerns raised bySchore. One of the underlying
messages of that essay,and a key point made by Schore, is that,
"Yet by far,neuroscience ... is much more concerned with
'cog-nitive' rather than 'affective' neuroscience" and "haspaid
little attention to developing brains" (see websiteabove). It is
truly remarkable the degree to which emo-tional research has been
marginalized in the neurosci-ence community. Modern neuroscience
has barelygotten past simplistic behavioristic versions of
howemotions are organized in the brain (Panksepp,1999b).
Neuroscience is still having a "resistance cri-sis" to integrative
concepts that are needed to under-stand the global abilities of the
brain. Perhapspsychoanalytic thought can help break down
thosebarriers. As Schore emphasizes, the consequences formental
health and psychiatric issues would beenormous.
Comment by Robert N. Emde (Vol. 2, No.1)Robert Emde adds a
variety of important dimensionsto the discussion that were not
emphasized in the ini-tial dialogue. His essay provides a useful
entry to avariety of critical issues, and presumably future
issuesof the journal will continue to highlight the mass
ofknowledge that has emerged from the
psychoanalytictradition-including "the components view of emo-tions
in the clinical literature of psychoanalysis ... theliterature on
the particulars of signal anticipatory af-fects ... and of the
emotions of depression, shame,safety, and security related to
attachment ... including
Jaak Panksepp
the psychoanalytic literature of the second half of the20th
century ... that ... contains working hypothesesand cogent
descriptions of clinical phenomena thatare useful for
neuroscientific explorations" (p. 70).Clearly, this is one of the
major goals of this interdisci-plinary dialogue: to have the
subtlety of psychoana-lytic thought provide new ways to look at
integrativeactions of the brain-mind. Perhaps the issues of
repres-sion, transference, and repetition compulsion takecenter
stage in such efforts. All this will help us takea "historical
point of view placing Freudian thoughtin a wider and deeper
context." Emde emphasizes theimportance of coming to terms with
"empathy andemotional communication" especially "in the midstof
transference-countertransference interactions' ,which are to be
understood "as supplementing theanalytic processes of
introspection, reflection, and in-terpretation." It is clear that
"much remains to belearned about the workings of such mental
activity,its connection with emotions, and its modes of
expres-sion." We need much more "knowledge about theexperienced
environment across development." An-other topic that deserves more
focus is temperamentwhich "can be thought of as a biologically
based pre-disposition to respond emotionally in certain wayswhen
certain individuals find themselves in certain en-vironmental
contexts." Finally Emde emphasizes themany issues of ethics that
are bound to emerge fromour new knowledge. To quote this important
issue infull:
Ethics has not been a traditional focus for psychoana-lytic
exploration. Still, the forthcoming opportunitiesthat will be
presented by virtue of advances in ourknowledge of the particulars
of genetic variation, aswell as our knowledge of the particulars of
brain de-velopment in relation to experience, are profound.The more
we understand about the meaning of indi-vidual experience in the
midst of specified biologicalvariation and its developmental
consequences, themore we can inform our general discussions
aboutthe deployment of limited resources for preventionand
intervention efforts across individuals. The morewe can understand
about the meaning of individualexperience in relation to its
neurophysiological under-pinnings, the more we can inform ethical
discussionsthat involve individual patients and their
fami-lies-discussions that can give maximal attention tohuman
dignity, emotional aspects of the quality of lifeand human
potential [po 73].
Let me close this synopsis of Emde's essay, by empha-sizing his
view that the new findings from neurosci-
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ence are bound to confront us with ethical choices asprofound as
those that emerged from the power ofnuclear physics. How we deal
with such issues willbe momentous for the emergence of cultural
traditionsthat can magnify or diminish the human spirit. I
thinkthat the type of image of emotional processes that Ihave
sought to encapsulate in Affective Neurosciencehelps point us
toward positive cultural changes thatmay help us deal creatively
and positively with thisnew knowledge. My reading of the evidence
is thatdeep emotional values were built into the brain at avery
early point in evolution, and that our penchantfor cultural
relativism and the presumed arbitrarinessof values, can be
counteracted by the fact that at thevery core of our being we are
remarkably similar,deeply feeling creatures. A positive future for
theworld can be promoted if we recognize that many ofthese deep
evolutionary values are ones we share withother animals, providing
us a sense of continuity withthe natural world that must be
incorporated as a foun-dation for our thinking if we are going to
make thisworld a better place. The discipline of
neuropsychoa-nalysis may eventually be an examplar of a way
toremain deeply scientific but not nihilistic about hu-man
nature.
Comment by Rainer Krause (Vol. 2, No.1)I think Rainer Krause's
interesting remarks may needthe attention of all the contributors,
especially ofSolms and Nersessian. However, let me
personallyrespond to Rainer's suggestions that "it might behelpful
to the reader to get to know in more detail thecultural,
methodological, and professional backgroundof the authors" (p. 75).
Perhaps, the editors of Neuro-Psychoanalysis would like to make
that a regular partof the journal, allowing readers to be better
introducedto the various contributors (as is the practice in
somejournals). Anyway, I was born in Emil Kraepelin'slaboratory
both literally and figuratively. Before hehad the opportunity to go
to Munich because of thesuccess of his seminal Textbook
ofPsychiatry, Kraepe-lin's first position was at the University of
Dorpat(then called Tartu), and his laboratory on the Univer-sity
Hill, no longer there, was close to where the Wom-en's Clinic was
built. There in Estonia, I was born inthe midst of a war that left
many emotional scars onthe innocent. Those events made clear, even
in mychildhood, that the nature of affect was one of themost
interesting and important questions we could askabout human nature.
My own interests in psychiatric
79
and emotional issues gelled when I was an undergrad-uate at the
University of Pittsburgh, working for myliving expenses in the
hard-core, back wards of St.Francis Hospital. Being on the night
shift, I had manyspare hours to read clinical records between the
rou-tine duties of orderlies in the chaotic psychotic wardsof those
days. New psychiatric medications were justtaking hold. This
exposure to the dark side of the hu-man spirit, led me to start
graduate work in clinicalpsychology at the University of
Massachusetts, but Isoon realized how few psychologists back in the
radi-cally behavioristic times of the 1960s had much ofsubstance to
say about emotions. I decided that theonly way to understand what
emotions really werewas through neuroscience pursuits, and I have
neverregretted that decision. It was evident from the workof the
great physiologists of the first half of the 20thcentury (e.g.,
Hess) that emotions were fundamentallysubcortically organized, and
because of the apparenthomologies that were becoming evident at the
fineneuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiolog-ical levels,
there seemed to be a good chance that ifone learned about the basic
emotional tendencies ofother mammals, one would also learn about
the funda-mental nature of emotions in the humans. I have notbeen
disappointed by that assumption, but I have beendisappointed in how
reluctant the neuroscience andpsychological communities has been to
embrace thatpath to substantive knowledge about those
importanthuman concerns. However, I am delighted that varioushuman
sciences, including the emerging neuropsy-choanalytic community,
has embraced Affective Neu-roscience. I am now convinced that we
can create awhole new generation of biological psychiatry withthe
emerging knowledge (based largely on developingnew ways to modulate
the emotion-specific neuropep-tide systems), but I suspect that the
emergence of suchknowledge will require a whole new depth
psychologi-cal methodology that will be more closely related tothe
20th-century psychoanalytic traditions than anyother. I am also
convinced that our attempt to scien-tifically understand the
surface veneer of emotional-ity-the cognitive and cultural
manifestations-atleast at the present time, is less important than
comingto terms with the fundamental neural basis of affect,which is
probably remarkably homologous in thebrains of all mammals. This is
still a minority opinion,but I think it will be seen as a
no-brainer when wefinally come to terms with the evolutionary
epistemol-ogy of the human spirit. However, all this leads
menaturally to consider Rainer's claim that: "The cul-tural
differences in the understanding of affect, its ex-
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pression, and handling are as big as the differencesbetween the
different forms of psychoanalysis" (p.75). I suspect that will not
be the case when we probethe general principles that regulate
emotionally amongthe subcortical systems that all mammals
share.
Rainer Krause also raises the most interestingpoint that "Green,
Yorke, as well as Solms and Ners-essian agree that a 'firm
foundation for a psychologi-cal theory of affect exists in the work
of Freud' " (p.75). He continues, that all four of them stick to
Freud'sreasoning on 'Trieb' (drive/instinct) which Panksepp(1999a),
Shevrin (1999), and myself (Krause, 1997,1998) would want to give
up in the existing form.These differences are by no means academic,
in fact,they are related to different treatment
techniques(Hamilton, 1997)" (p. 75). It will be most interestingto
see how the discipline of psychoanalysis will mod-ify this core
concept to bring it in line with existingknowledge of the brain.
Perhaps we can even see it asa case study to serve as a barometer
of the willingnessof the discipline to mold its tribal orthodoxies,
and toevolve with the emerging evidence.
I also resonated to some extent with Rainer's as-sertion that
"the main problem of Freud's (1915) andI am afraid Solms' and
Nersessian's thinking was andstill is, that it is not related to
biology in the form of'human ethology' and 'psychological ethology'
....As a consequence of that they do not take into accountthe
co-evolution of affect as a motoric-expressive so-cial signal
system that influences the social partner ina highly specific way,
and affect as a form of a usuallyunconscious representational frame
for perceiving theself in the world, in line with the specific
affect" (p.75).
I am also committed to the view that we must bewilling to
develop whole new methodologies to tackleissues of
psychoethological importance. Freud cer-tainly contributed
substantially in his narratives, butwe must now supplement that
tradition with an empiri-cal rigor that matches all the other
sciences. If toomuch is left to the clinical interpretation of
individu-als, the science of psychoethology cannot thrive. I amin
complete agreement with Krause's emphasis on theunity of the
motoric and affective aspects of emotionaldischarge. There is a
deep unity here, especially inanimals and babies, where repressive
mechanisms areprobably not as abundant. Rainer goes on to
assert,"The great problem of Freud's conceptualization isthe
omission of the phylogenetic coevolution of affectas an internal
coding of the subject's state in the world,and its specific
reference to the social partner who'understands' it in its
specificity. The affect system is
Jaak Panksepp
a primary symbolic system transmitting knowledge ofour
phylogenetic and ontogenetic ancestors to ourselfand to our social
partners. Cognition is superimposedon that system but cannot
override it" (p. 76). I amnot enough of a Freud scholar to know the
degree offailure in this realm, but I would assert that any
depthpsychological scheme that does not take this type ofpotential
ground plan for the human psyche seriouslyis bound to remain
remarkably short-sighted. Withouta clear vision of the importance
of a motoricallygrounded affect for all human affairs, we may well
bemissing the boat once more. Our ability to build cul-tures that
protect us from negative affects along withour emotionally cool
corticocognitive apparatus, thatcan voluntarily repress affective
energies, now preventus from having much experience with intense
negativeemotions. The ancestral "energies" that subsist deepin our
basic emotional systems remain unfamiliar tomany of us, and they
seep out only through the cracksof our behavioral inhibitions, as
little musculartwitches and quiverings (and Rainer Krause has
donesome of the best empirical work on those issues).
This massive emotional repression, I would sub-mit, is the main
reason that neuroscientists deny affectas a proper topic of study
in the arena of animal brainresearch. Surely that will also have
consequences forhow we, as a community of scholars, study and
discussemotions. Hence Krause's claim that "as far as I cansee this
dominance is partly a consequence of fundingpractice and a defense
mechanism in the neuroscien-tific community and especially the
cognitive sciencecommunity wanting to define and explain human
na-ture as close to rationality as possible" (p. 78). Andthereby
"the dream of reason" and the desire forknowledge at the quantum
level continue to createmonstrous views that neglect and often
attempt to ne-gate the nature of the deep neuropsychological
pro-cesses that evolution bestowed on us as well as othercreatures.
Because of the failure of the scientific estab-lishment to deal
effectively with the ancient integrativesystems of the brain, there
is now an enormous spacefor the emerging discipline of
neuropsychoanalysis tofill the void, both in theory and in
practice.
References
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Ongoing Discussion (Vol. 2, No.2)
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Department of PsychologyBowling Green State University1001 East
Wooster StreetBowling Green, OH 43403e-mail:
[email protected]
Ongoing Discussion of Book Reviews of Jaak Panksepp (1998),
Affective Neuroscience (Vol. 2, No.2)Commentary by Paul D. MacLean
(Bethesda)
The invitation to comment upon Panksepp's book forthis journal
gives occasion to encounter two quite newexpressions. The first is
the expression neuropsychoa-nalysis. I am told that this new
journal originated be-cause of the interest of a group of analysts
in keepingabreast of developments in neuroscience. (Later on,
aresearch question will arise that suggests how a recip-rocal
desire might present itself in neuroscience.) Theterm
psychoanalysis itself is the one that Freud finallydecided to adopt
as a name for the method of freeassociation. There seems to be no
precedent for theterm with the prefix neuro. Any adherence here
to
Paul D. MacLean is one of the great pioneers of modern
behavioralneuroscience. He is based at the National Institutes of
Mental Health,Bethesda, Maryland.
historical usage would be purely symbolic, referringto Freud's
lifelong conviction "that there was no evi-dence of psychical
processes occurring apart fromphysiological ones: that no mind
could exist apartfrom a brain" (Jones, 1953, p. 368).
The second expression is the name of Panksepp' sbook, Affective
Neuroscience (1998). In the preface,Panksepp describes his aims in
writing the book andoutlines his reasons for choosing to focus on
topics ofan affective nature. We should interrupt him by askingwhy
he chose the expression affective neuroscience.A definition of the
two words affect and emotion helpssteer us to some clarification.
In a medical dictionarysuch as Dorland's one finds the word affect
defined asa "Freudian term" referring to a pleasant or unpleas-ant
feeling. The subjective experience of affect is en-
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