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Commentary by Howard Shevrin (Ann Arbor)

a

Howard Shevrin
a

University of Michigan Medical Center, Riverview Building, 900 Wall Street, Ann Arbor,
MI 48105-0722, e-mail:
Published online: 09 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Howard Shevrin (1999) Commentary by Howard Shevrin (Ann Arbor), Neuropsychoanalysis: An
Interdisciplinary Journal for Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences, 1:1, 55-60, DOI: 10.1080/15294145.1999.10773246
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Commentary on Emotions: Neuro-Psychoanalytic Views

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Commentary by Howard Shevrin (Ann Arbor)

Bridge building between psychoanalysis and neuroscience, disciplines that on their face appear to be worlds
apart, has been deemed by some foolhardy and by
others premature, yet as the Solms and Nersessian
summary of Freud's affect theory and Panksepp's position paper attest, the time may be ripe and the enterprise fruitful. Most gratifying from a psychoanalyst's
standpoint is the call made by Panksepp for drawing,
not only on psychoanalytic insights, but for integrating
Howard Shevrin, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology, Department of
Psychiatry, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

the psychoanalytic method with psychological and

neuroscience research approaches. As someone who
has been committed to this integration in my own research (Shevrin, Bond, Brakel, Hertel, and Williams,
1996), I welcome these exciting efforts to advance
interchange between psychoanalysis and neuroscience.
In my commentary I will be limiting my observations to some of the issues raised concerning the relationship of affect to consciousness, motivation, and
action. Insofar as the Panksepp paper is in part a detailed response to the Solms and Nersessian summary

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S6

of Freud's views, in my comments I will necessarily

at times be referring to both papers.
I would like first to make one general observation
on the role of theory in psychoanalysis and neuroscience. As Panksepp observes and seems rather to lament, a purely empirical approach is deeply
entrenched in contemporary neuroscience (as in all the
life sciences) which is accompanied by a profound
suspicion of comprehensive theories. He refers trenchantly and vividly to the contrast between "Freud's
wide-ranging hypotheses, often metaphorically expressed, against the accumulating peppercorns of evidence from the basic and clinical neurosciences." The
time, he believes, is ripe to stop simply accumulating
these "peppercorns" and to bring them into some hierarchical relationship to each other so that' 'complex
functional domains" can be conceptualized. In this
task Freudian theory can be of great help if only as
an initial approximation which will undoubtedly be
modified in the light of new evidence.
Psychoanalysis can contribute to neuroscience in
two important ways by providing, (1) a theory on a
complex level of functional integration that takes individual subjectivity and personal context into account,
(2) a method of inquiry that investigates the intimate
subjective and behavioral expression of this functional
integration in a manner and depth no other psychological method approaches. On its part, neuroscience can
offer psychoanalysis an objective and detailed accounting of brain mechanisms and processes bearing
on its hypotheses, either providing support, raising
questions, or suggesting useful modifications of them.
Above all, neuroscience together with psychoanalysis
can create a comprehensive picture of the mind and
its neurophysiological and neuroanatomical instantiation in the brain. It is in that spirit that I now undertake
to examine the three issues concerning affect identified previously.

The Relationship of Affect to Consciousness

According to Solms and Nersessian, Freud hypothesized that affects are "perceived in a distinctive modality of consciousness ... calibrated in degrees of
pleasure and unpleasure." Consciousness is conceptualized along the lines of a sense organ which transduces quantitative unconscious oscillations in the
tension of instinctual needs into qualitative experiences of pleasure and unpleasure. These qualitative
conscious experiences are mental and representa-

Howard Shevrin
tional; the quantitative unconscious processes are
mental and nonrepresentational.
How well does Panksepp's understanding of related neuroscience findings fit with this theory linking
affect to consciousness and the unconscious? In short,
what kind of bridge exists, or still needs to be built?
With respect to the central role of pleasure and unpleasure Panksepp expresses some reservations, stating
that "broad categories ... (like) ... positive and negative affect (reminiscent of Freud's global pleasure-unpleasure dimension) ... may be obfuscating
our pursuit of the basic systems that actually exist in
the brain." Panksepp then refers to at least a "dozen
basic systems that actually exist in the brain" associated with different qualities of basic affect experience.
How might psychoanalytic theory as presented by
Solms and Nersessian accommodate these findings?
With respect to the indivisible relationship of affect to consciousness ascribed by Solms and Nersessian to Freud, Panksepp talks about how "affect
regulators may ... (descend) ... to preconscious levels of neural processing" And elsewhere he cites LeDoux's research on unconscious affect. If I follow
Solms and Nersessian in their understanding of Freud,
affects cannot be preconscious or unconscious, but are
quintessentially conscious. There is a potential disconnect here that must be addressed, about which more
later.
It is also instructive to examine how Panksepp
views the id and its unconscious functioning in neuroscience terms. Here we find a potentially serious problem. When Panksepp talks about the qualitative and
quantitative aspects of affective life, he does not appear to be talking about the same coordinates as Solms
and Nersessian for whom the qualitative characterizes
conscious affect experience and the quantitative characterizes unconscious processes which are transduced
into conscious affect experience. Instead Panksepp is
referring to the quantitative aspects of conscious qualitative affect experience. Thus a conscious unpleasant
feeling may be weaker or stronger than another unpleasant feeling. In fact, Panksepp expressly rejects
the notion of what he refers to as a "vague, hydraulic
concept like 'drive'." In its place Panksepp would
prefer "specific regulatory motivational functions
such as hunger, thirst, and thermoregulation, where
specific interoreceptive detector elements have been
identified in medial strata of the diencephalon." One
would of course wish to add sex to the list of specific
regulatory motivational functions.
Is there a problem here, or would Solms and
Nersessian reply that rising or lessening tension in any

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Commentary on Emotions: Neuro-Psychoanalytic Views

motivational system would be perceived consciously
as unpleasurable or pleasurable? But this reply would
create another problem: If the conscious perception is
limited to pleasure or unpleasure how would we know
which motivational system was activated? Since we
do know, at least after a certain age, what it is we
want or need, there must also be some conscious
awareness of the motivational state itself quite apart
from the consciousness of pleasure and unpleasure. I
would assume that Solms and Nersessian would
counter in Freud's behalf that we arrive at such knowledge by inference from the specific motoric systems
that are activated (e.g., our genitals in the case of sexual motivation), rather than by direct experience (but
more about this in the next section on affect and motivation).
The other important characteristic of unconscious
processes as attributed to Freud by Solms and Nersessian is its nonrepresentational nature. Only consciousness is representational; only in consciousness do we
know what our minds are about. Unconsciously quantitative nonrepresentational processes prevail that
seem quite similar to the computational accounts favored by cognitive psychology and some in the neurosciences. Yet Panksepp in various places uses the
accepted terminology of neuroscience when he talks
about "signal detectors" at all levels of the nervous
system as in the previous quote in which he talks about
,'specific interoceptive detector elements" as intrinsic
to motivational systems that presumably are in psychoanalytic terms part of the ide A detector is in the
same class as a sense organ; it responds to a signal
which may be an increase in a quantity of some sort
(e.g., heat), or a different qualitative input as might be
carried by a particular hormone (e.g., sexual arousal).
If I understand Panksepp correctly, from a neuroscience standpoint it would be better to talk about hierarchical levels of organization, each with its own
pattern of qualitative and quantitative processes,
rather than restrict the qualitative to one level of the
hierarchy (consciousness) and the quantitative to another (the unconscious). As pointed out by Grossman
(1992), in his interesting analysis of the implications
for our understanding of Freud that can be drawn from
his early monograph On Aphasia (1953), Freud's fundamental conception of the mind is of a complex hierarchy of levels of organization in which the important
processes happen at the boundaries where qualitative
transformations take place. Each higher level "detects" and in this sense "represents'' what is going
on at a lower level. There are thus "sense organs"
throughout this hierarchy detecting and "represent-

57

ing" qualitative and quantitative processes to be

passed on to the next level in the hierarchy. This view
leaves open the question as to where consciousness
and the unconscious fit into this hierarchical organization.

The Relationship of Affect to Motivation

In his discussion of affect and motivation, Panksepp
makes an interesting distinction between a "behavioral state of anticipatory eagerness" and a "simple
and unitary sensation of positive affect." He calls the
former a SEEKING system that can serve a wide
range of motivational urges. Panksepp relates this concept to research by Berridge and Robinson (1995) on
investigations of addiction in rats and humans in
which they demonstrated that affect and craving operated independently of each other. Different neural systems were involved. A craving can intensify without
any increase in unpleasure, and it can be gratified
without any increase in pleasure. Panksepp hypothesizes that the Berridge and Robinson "wanting" system of the brain "mediates feelings of an obsessively
energized sense of desire and power rather than any
simple pleasurable sensation that we normally experience when we fulfill our needs." It becomes moot
whether one should refer to experiences of desire or
power as affective or motivational experiences. Paradoxically one can say that they feel motivational and
can either be pleasurable or unpleasurable, supporting
the Berridge and Robinson findings. Of course, one
can, as proposed by Panksepp, talk about two kinds
of affects, the "basic emotional affects ... linked to
basic instinctual action readiness systems," and the
"motivational affects ... linked to sensory systems."
It is hard to see how experiences of desire and power,
which appear to be motivational affects, are more
closely linked to sensory rather than action readiness
systems.
All in all it might be clearer conceptually and
closer to empirical findings (Berridge and Robinson,
1995), to identify a class of experiences as motivational which is independent of another class of experiences called affective..Each such class would have its
unconscious as well as conscious aspects so that we
could speak of unconscious motives becoming conscious, and conscious affects becoming unconscious.
This alternative allows for a more flexible and varied
relationship between affect and motivation, conscious
and unconscious, than the view attributed to Freud by
Solms and Nersessian. It also makes possible a further

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58
distinction in experience that is also consonant with
the Berridge and Robinson findings. Increasing and
decreasing motivational tension, instead of being
linked to conscious experiences of unpleasure and
pleasure, would be linked to experiences of frustration
and gratification. It would thus become possible for a
state of frustration of an urge to be experienced as
pleasurable, and a state of gratification as unpleasurable. There are many clinical instances of such combinations.
One significant problem encountered by this alternate view is how to account for the function affect
serves. In Freud's system as described by Solms and
Nersessian, and as accepted by Panksepp, affects ascribe value to need states and thus function importantly in adaptation. Value is defined as an affective representation of the internal state of the individual. Affect
informs us of what's doing in our minds and bodies.
But why do we need to be so informed? One can
imagine an organism in which internal need states are
acted on or inhibited without any detour into affect
experience; it is conceivable that the lower phyla live
in this way. If this is the case, what evolutionary event
made the development of affect adaptationally advantageous? Clearly it would be a mistake to argue that
affects are epiphenomenal, as Panksepp reminds us is
the view of some neuroscientists.
A possible answer is to be found in an interesting
hypothesis advanced by Panksepp as he tries to grapple with the question raised by Solms and Nersessian
concerning "what are affects a perception of?" He
urges investigators to devote research to regions of
the brain where' 'emotional values and external events
are first coordinated with a coherent map of the
body. " He goes on to speculate that it is in these
brain zones "where id and ego processes begin their
massively entangled battle for primacy that reverberates through all subsequent levels of neural development of each individual and species." Consistent with
these thoughts is Panksepp' s later consideration of
what he refers to as the "great dilemma of the subjective phenomenological view" that seemingly purely
internal events, from one standpoint, are actually experienced as related to the world. Although the "entangled battle for primacy" between id and ego takes
place internally, and perhaps in a specific brain locality as proposed by Panksepp, the battle is about what
is going on externally and what to do about it. It should
not be surprising that a high-functioning autistic' 'selfcentered and emotionally aloof 17-year-old," once put
on naltrexone became more sensitive to her parents,
but ascribed the change not to something inside her-

Howard Shevrin
self, but to differences in how her parents were responding to her. And Panksepp adds "perhaps they
were, through subtle interactions, that arose from her
increased intimacy with their lives." The point is that
we should not confuse the locus of action "inside"
with the function of that action which is always outwardly directed. Adaptation at the individual level is
always about adaptation to a particular surround. Or
to put it differently, we do not act to feel better, we feel
better when we act successfully in the world, which
in psychoanalytic terms means engaging in an action
resulting from some compromise between the id and
ego forces battling, as proposed by Panksepp, "in the
centromedial areas of the mesencephalon and the reticular nuclei of the thalamus." From this standpoint
affect functions, not as a mere perception of internal
events, but as a messenger or signal for needed action
arising from the needful requirements of the individual
which must be met in a particular environment. This
function of affect is acknowledged by Solms and Nersessian in the form of signal affect which is correctly
accorded a place at a high level of ego maturity. In
psychoanalytic theory signal affect functions unconsciously and signals an impending danger if the individual were to act on certain unacceptable wishes, or
even to become aware of them. I am suggesting that all
affects have that function. They are signals, sometimes
subtle and unconscious, sometimes gross and conscious, which indicate the import of the internal battle
for what we must or must not do next. We know from
animal studies that even states of utter helplessness,
as in abandoned or lost baby monkeys, can result in
an adaptational posture given the extreme circumstances the infant finds itself in. After a period of futile
unanswered distress calls the baby monkey becomes
mute and assumes what appears to be a fetal position
which renders the monkey less noticeable to a predator. The affect of helplessness is not simply the perception of an internal state, but functions integrally as a
part of an action system.

The Relationship of Affect to Action

As already noted, affect, to be understood, must be
conceptualized as part of the individual's action oriented pursuit of need gratification and survival in a
particular surround. It is the first harbinger of intended
action. As such it provides some breathing space, or
delay, between motivational urgency and action. In so
doing it makes it possible to entrain a variety of cognitive capacities, most importantly memory, so that an

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Commentary on Emotions: Neuro-Psychoanalytic Views

intended action can take into account previous experience as well as current perceptions. Freud cogently
identified a series of danger situations which the individual must act to avoid. The mute monkey in the fetal
position is avoiding attracting a predator. But prior to
that point the monkey emitting its distress calls was
experiencing what Freud referred to as the loss of the
caretaking object, the single most survival threatening
danger any mammalian infant can face. The other dangers Freud identified-loss of love, threat to bodily
integrity (castration anxiety), loss of self-regard-are
again all intimately tied to acting in a real world, even
when there are misperceptions of that world, as in
neurosis, which are at stark variance with any consensus as to what that reality is.
The intent of my comment on the relationship of
affect to action is to counteract the tendency in Freud
to base an understanding of affect on what appears to
be a purely utilitarian, Benthamlike conception: We
act in order to maximize pleasure and minimize unpleasure; our motives are hostage to a calculus of pleasure and pain, whereas, as Freud also recognized in
underscoring the importance of the four danger situations, our actions are not indissolubly tied to pleasure
and pain, but are intimately related to our perceptions
and anticipations as to what will happen in the world if
and when we act. Here one is reminded ofPanksepp's
system of SEEKING, which is essentially action oriented, having to do with desire and power, both of
which are faced outward toward the world.

A Few Final Thoughts

I mentioned earlier that I would return to the role of
consciousness and the unconscious in a theory positing
a complex hierarchy of levels of organization in which
quantitative and qualitative factors interact at each
level. In his psychoanalytic monograph on topography, Gill (1963) concluded that a careful reading of
Freud suggested that id, ego, and superego functions
operated at a number of different levels. Instead of
conceptualizing the id as the repository solely of the
more primitive motives (drives), the id might be better
thought of as the motivational component in any act,
with the ego and superego functioning as moderating
and regulatory agencies at any level. Similarly, consciousness as subjective awareness can occur at any
level of the hierarchy, performing its primary function,
which is to make it possible for the individual to distinguish between perception and memory so that action
in the real world can be ordered by a modification of

59

past experience in the light of current experience (see

Shevrin [1998] for a fuller account). In neurosis the
past triumphs over the present by subverting the role
of consciousness and can do so at any level.
The psychoanalytic dynamic unconscious is created by acts of repression in which distinctions between past and present, fantasy and reality are erased.
From this standpoint the dynamic unconscious can be
qualitative (e.g., containing representations of past experience), and quantitative (motivational strength).
What distinguishes it from consciousness are the principles according to which its representations are organized, which Freud referred to as the primary process.
It is the operation of the primary process on such mental representations as memory and perception which
creates confusions of past and present and ignores
the vital distinction between current perception and
memory. The dominant force on any level of unconscious mentation is the wish with its insistence on
recreating past experiences of gratification no matter
what the actual current real possibilities. The dynamic
unconscious is a poor learner.
In my reading of Panksepp I find repeated references to different levels of neural organization. In his
conclusion, for example, he states, "the levels of complexity already revealed at the neuroscience level ... are so vast that no one can have confidence in
relating them to human psychodynamics that arise
from the immeasurably complex interactions of many
neural systems." But it is this discovered complexity
at the neuroscience level that is the best harbinger of
future success in building bridges between the neurosciences and psychoanalysis.

References
Berridge, K. C., & Robinson, T. (1995), The mind of an
addicted brain: Neural sensitization of wanting versus
liking. Curro Direct. in Psycholog. Sci., 4:71-76.
Freud, S. (1953), On Aphasia: A Critical Study. New York:
International Universities Press.
Gill, M. M. (1963), Topography and Systems in Psychoanalytic Theory. Psychological Issues, Monogr. 10. New
York: International Universities Press.
Grossman, W. I. (1992), Hierarchies, boundaries, and representations in a Freudian model of mental organization.
J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 40:27-26.
Shevrin, H. (1998), Why do we need to be so conscious?
A psychoanalytic answer. In: Advanced Personality, ed.

60
D. F. Barone, M. Hersen, & V. B. Van Hasselt. New
York: Plenum Press.
- - Bond, J., Brakel, L. A. W., Hertel, R. K., &
Williams, W. J. (1996), Conscious and Unconscious Processes: Psychodynamic, Cognitive, and Neurophysiological Convergences. New York: Guilford Press.

Clifford Yorke
Howard Shevrin
University of Michigan Medical Center
Riverview Building, 900 Wall Street
Ann Arbor, MI48105-0722
e-mail: shevrin @ umich. edu

Affects, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience

Commentary by Clifford Yorke (South Moreton, England)

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I
When I was still a student, I had the temerity to speak
during a discussion, at the British Psycho-Analytic Society, of a paper that touched on the subject of affects.
Although I had read a good deal of Freud I was, perhaps, unduly influenced by Rapaport (1953) and others when I asserted that the understanding of affects
was perhaps the weakest part of the psychoanalytic
theory of the way the mind worked. No one contradicted me, and no psychoanalytic elder pointed out
that a firm foundation for a psychological theory of
affect already existed in Freud's writings. As my acquaintance with Freud deepened, and I began to know
better, I looked back on the episode with some astonishment.
It might be thought that the uncritical reaction to
my ill-judged assertion was due to a reluctance, on
the part of the enlightened, to contradict a student,
however callow, who had dared to take part in open
debate. That is unlikely: It would surely have been
more helpful to set to rights such a wrong-headed declaration. It began to dawn on me that the plain fact of
the matter was that no one knew I was wrong. How
can this be explained?
Solms and Nersessian are surely right when they
say that Freud's theory of affects is scattered throughout an extensive literature covering some 40 years of
experience and reflection, and that no single work is
devoted to a full exposition of its fundamental judgments and concepts. That would certainly account for
some of the misunderstandings, though not perhaps all
the misrepresentations. Some of the latter have come
from willful distortions of Freud's thinking by those
who come from outside the profession and who, for a
Clifford Yorke, F.R.C.Psych., D.P.M., is a Training and Supervising
Analyst, British Psychoanalytic Society.

number of reasons, wish to blacken his character or

transmogrify his ideas. Detractors of this kind need not
concern us here. More important are the uninformed
criticisms that come from inside the discipline; and in
this connection we have to ask ourselves whether there
are reasons for the misrepresentations other than those
put forward by the authors of the outstanding, summarizing paper with which we have been presented. I
believe there are.
The fact that affects, and the anticipation of them,
so often function as motivators has led many analysts
to believe that their link with those activating forces
that Freud called drives can be jettisoned. Freud's concept of drive (Trieb) has been under fire, for very many
years, for reasons that call for closer consideration
than this occasion permits (Strachey translated Trieb
as instinct, but drive is preferred today).! Many psychoanalysts have no difficulty in recognizing manifestations of aggression and sexuality, but seem not to
understand the concept of drives by which Freud
sought to explain their motivating power. It is widely
believed today that affects can replace drives rather
than be linked with them. If Freud's theory of affects
is misunderstood, so is his theory of drives. So I want
to underline, in the course of what follows, his definition of drives as emphasized by Solms and Nersessian
in their paper, adding one or two points. However,
a few remarks seem in order that apply, within the
profession, to a good deal of Freud criticism in general
and not simply to the more specific issues of drives
and affects.
1 Many practicing clinicians are satisfied with a clinical theory that
appears to help them to understand their patients better without recourse
to the theory of mind that lies behind it. Freud's theory of mind is known as
metapsychology because it goes beyond the consideration of consciousness
alone-the exclusive concern of many preanalytic psychologists. It is a
theory at a higher level of abstraction than a clinical theory (Freeman,
1992, 1995; Yorke, 1995, 1996).