Vous êtes sur la page 1sur 5

This article was downloaded by: [Gazi University]

On: 18 August 2014, At: 06:34


Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer
House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal


for Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rnpa20

Jaak Panksepps Response: Commentary by Howard


Shevrin
a

Howard Shevrin
a

Department of Psychiatry, University of Michigan Medical Center, Riverview Building,


900 Wall Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48105, e-mail:
Published online: 09 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Howard Shevrin (1999) Jaak Panksepps Response: Commentary by Howard Shevrin,
Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences, 1:2, 247-250, DOI:
10.1080/15294145.1999.10773265
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15294145.1999.10773265

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE


Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the Content) contained
in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no
representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of
the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied
upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall
not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other
liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or
arising out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic
reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any
form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://
www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

247

ONGOING DISCUSSION

Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 06:34 18 August 2014

Jaak Panksepp's Response: Commentary by Howard Shevrin

Mter reading Panksepp's response to the commentaries


on his position paper, in my judgment several important
outstanding issues still remained. I will address these
issues and conclude with a recommended empirical approach which might deal with them. The issues are
these: (1) the relationship between affect and motivation; (2) the relationships among conscious, unconscious, and nonconscious processes; (3) the relationship
between psychoanalytic and neuroscience methods.

Affect and Motivation


As I have tried to examine elsewhere (Shevrin, 1997),
a widespread tendency exists in psychology, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience to conflate motivation with
affect. When, for example, Panksepp talks about the
important SEEKING system he describes it as a kind
of amorphous affect state with a certain indefinable
"oomph." When this system is activated the animal
presumably begins a kind of restless movement in its
surround during which it may encounter food which
then activates the eating system resulting in eating, if
presumably the animal is hungry, or it will continue
its aimless travels until it encounters something else
of interest, and so on. Yet this does not seem to be
.the way Berridge and Robinson (1995) describe the
craving system they have identified and which Panksepp uses as a basis for his SEEKING system. For
Berridge and Robinson a quite specific sensitization
of a particular craving occurs-a craving, for example,
for a particular drug. Moreover, this craving operates
entirely independently of whether the stimulus is experienced as pleasurable or unpleasurable. It is on the
basis of this finding and other theoretical considerations that I have argued elsewhere (Shevrin, 1997) and
in my previous commentary, that experienced pleasure
Dr. Shevrin is on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry, Michigan University Medical Center.

and unpleasure, which is for many the central affective


dimension, must be separated from the gratification or
frustration of a craving, or more generally of a desire,
a wish, or a want-in short a motivation. One can gratify the craving for cocaine and feel awful right at the
time, or feel nothing at all. This is the burden of the Berridge and Robinson finding. Panksepp's argument that
motivation is the name of a class of events which include affects does not accord with these findings or understanding. Affect and motivation are separate mental
events and have separate neurophysiological instantiations.
Once one accepts that affect and motive are distinct mental and neurophysiological events then one
can begin to better appreciate the psychoanalytic emphasis on the importance of drives. As Yorke makes
plain in his commentary, the notion of drive does not
accord with Panksepp's effort to equate it with the
amorphous SEEKING system which is inherently objectless and amorphously affective. Rather, as in the
specificity for drug craving, drives are specific to objects which can gratify the drive, most prominently in
psychoanalysis the sexual drive gratified by a range
of sexual objects. And by the same token, gratification
may result in unpleasure as well as pleasure, depending on context and the vicissitudes of individual
development.
But there is a way in which the objectless character of Panksepp's SEEKING system might be combined with the psychoanalytic conception of drive. I
have argued elsewhere (Shevrin and Toussieng, 1965;
Shevrin, 1997) that in the earliest stage of infancy
cravings are experienced as peremptory and undeniable, but without quality, by which I meant that the
infant is unaware of the nature of the gratifying object
although the craving itself is object-specific. It requires
a sensitive caretaker to figure out what the craving is
about, or as we say, what the baby needs. Interestingly,
Berridge and Robinson consider the craving system to
be unconscious, although it is not clear whether they

Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 06:34 18 August 2014

248

mean unconscious as a mental event or nonconscious


as a purely neurophysiological event, a point to be
taken up below. In the grip of a craving the infant
might be said to be in an objectless SEEKING state,
although the satisfying object required is quite specific. Perhaps animals are in that craving state when
they restlessly move about ignorant of the object they
seek. The infant will rather quickly develop beyond
this craving state and, as I have theorized, reach a point
at which they experience wishes, desires, or wants and
are now very clearly conscious of the objects they
seek. I suspect that higher mammals reach this state
as well when one considers, for example, how carefully and systematically social predators like lions and
wolves organize hunting parties. They know what they
are after.
The cantankerous problem of psychic energy associated with the concept of drive is best thought of,
not as a dimensionless "oomph," but as a capacity to
do work, the fundamental meaning of energy. In physics work is measured as the product of the distance
an object is translated in space and the force applied
to make it move that distance. Psychic work is best
thought of as the product of a motive force activating a
psychological (neurophysiological) system over time.
The stronger the motive force, or the longer the time
over which it persists, the more psychic work is being
done. A craving infant, in need of food, can cry for a
long time and is thus performing a great deal of work,
or the more fitting equivalent phrase would be exercising a great deal of effort. The work I am talking about
is not the physical effort expended in crying or flailing
about, but the psychic work of persisting in effortful
craving. Once the craving is transformed into a known
desire or want, an enormous amount of energy is conserved. And once language is acquired another qualitative transformation occurs with even greater
conservation of psychic energy. At the same time,
whatever has been in the broad sense repressed and
thus has not shared in these efficient transformations
remains at an earlier stage of effort with all of its
inefficient energy expenditures, prominent among
which are futile repetitions and reenactments which
amount to persistent effort, or continuing work. More
could be said as to how this view would account for
displacements, condensations, and other primary process manifestations, but for present purposes I simply
wish to illustrate how it is possible to distinguish
drives (motivations) from affects and to incorporate
an energy concept. The underlying model is not in the
strictest sense hydraulic, but is based on the Shannon
definition of information which must be clearly distin-

Howard Shevrin
guished from the way the term information is used by
cognitive psychologists when they talk about information processing: the former is based on the concept
of reducing uncertainty, the latter on the content of
psychic processes.
A word more about the primary process. In this
connection I very much appreciated Panksepp's insistently calling attention to what he called the primitive
force that affect organization can assume, and his willingness to consider equating this primitive force with
the psychic energy of drives. I believe that what I have
described above might provide an account of what
Panksepp is correctly addressing as important.

Conscious, Unconscious, and Nonconscious


Throughout the various discussions I felt that these
three terms were being used by the commentators in
quite different senses. Solms and Nersessian defined
the unconscious as quantitative and nonrepresentational, but mental nonetheless; consciousness was
qualitative and representational. The neuroscience
commentators, in particular LeDoux, appeared to
equate the unconscious with neurophysiological processes leaving open whether they qualified as mental;
in this respect he might have been better served by
referring to these neurophysiological events as nonconscious. When, for example, LeDoux, citing his own
research, claimed that it wasn't until the fear processing in the amygdala activated working memory
located in the cortex that fear as a conscious experience emerged, he can best be understood as saying
that nonconscious processes in the amygdala activate
conscious processes in the cortex. This would parallel
how we describe any sensory system: light activates
retinal nerve endings, neural impulses are transmitted
to the appropriate region of the cortex where conscious perception emerges; we do not ordinarily consider the retinal activation and neural transmission as
either conscious or unconscious-they are simply
nonconscious. At what point this nonconscious transmission becomes a mental event, either conscious or
unconscious, is the crucial and unanswered question,
and essentially constitutes a restatement of the
mind-body problem. For LeDoux the thalamic-amygdala circuit is simply part of a sensory system processing fear stimuli in much the same way that the
eye processes visual stimuli. The problem with this
approach is that we are not simply dealing with a sensory transmission process as in vision, but with a representational event in which something is known in

Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 06:34 18 August 2014

Ongoing Discussion

no matter how primitive a form, by which I mean that


what is processed in the amygdala is mental as well
as physiological, whereas the sensory transmission
process is solely physiological.
As I believe Panksepp makes clear, LeDoux's
version runs into difficulties precisely for the reason
just given: for Panksepp affect organizations at all
levels are powerful influences on experience and action and possess mental status in their own right at all
levels including the thalamic-amygdala level. I believe
that most psychoanalysts would concur, despite some
conceptual confusion as to whether affects as mental
events can be unconscious. In my judgment there is
substantial evidence that affects can be unconscious
mental events and are not limited to consciousness, or
be conceived according to LeDoux as nonconscious
physiological events until cognized (Bernat, Bunce,
and Shevrin, submitted; Wong, Shevrin, and Williams,
1994; Shevrin, Bond, Brakel, Hertel, and Williams,
1996; Shevrin, 1998).
Similarly, Panksepp takes Damasio to task for
basing his view of affect on the James-Lange theory
which postulates that affects are perceptions of bodily
events. If I understand Panksepp correctly, affects for
him are intrinsic brain organizations that are inherently mental, and which can be activated from various
directions, including the body. Insofar as affects are
perceptions it would seem that for Damasio affects are
always mental events; at what point in the transmission of bodily stimuli perception occurs and how this
transformation takes place returns us to the
mind-body problem.
Inescapably the sense organ model of consciousness rears its head, quite explicitly in Solms and Nersessian's exposition of Freud. I have tried to address
the problems in this model elsewhere (Shevrin, 1998).
For present purposes I will limit myself to pointing
out that the sense organ model of consciousness assumes that the critical cause-and-effect relationship
necessary to explain mental events is that of a sensorylike stimulus causing a perceptionlike response. It
is for this reason that Solms and Nersessian hypothesize that the unconscious is quantitative and nonrepresentational in order to provide it with sensorylike
attributes, and consciousness with qualitative properties. LeDoux from a very different perspective appears
to do the same thing, attributing sensory processing
properties to the amygdala and perceptionlike properties to the cortex. Damasio similarly attributes sensory
stimulus properties to the body and perceptionlike
properties to affect' 'perceiving" regions of the brain.
Panksepp, if I read him right, is taking a different tack

249
and one with which I am in general agreement. Mental
processes including affect, whether conscious or unconscious, are representational and qualitative as a
direct result of their inherent organization; they do not
acquire representational or qualitative status because
they are a "perception" of something else. The pertinent analogy is to how a muscle responds to neural
innervation: it contracts because that is what it is built
to do; its contraction is not a "perception" of the
"sensory" neural input. Similarly, the affect structures of the brain respond to innervations in accord
with their built in structures and functions; they are
not "perceptions" of "sensory" inputs. Perceptions
result when perceptual structures are activated. Aside
from theoretical considerations, a growing body of
subliminal perception and implicit memory research
attests to the qualitative and representational nature
of unconscious processes.
As we proceed further in our discourse it will be
of critical importance for each to be clear how the
terms conscious, unconscious and nonconscious are
used.

Psychoanalytic and Neuroscience Methods


In his commentary Green was much concerned with
incompatibilities between the psychoanalytic and neuroscience methods of investigation. While Panksepp
was especially intrigued with the contribution that a
psychoanalytic account of subjectivity could make to
neuroscience, Green appeared to be worried that the
subjective account rendered by psychoanalysis, and
the objective and in his view necessarily reductive
account offered by neuroscience, were simply not on
the same page. Panksepp at one point suggests that it
might be exciting to observe what happens to subjective report in an analytic context under the influence
of various medications. Freud speculated that medications might one day be discovered that directly affected drive strength and would thus change the
impulse-defense balance involved, for example, in
producing neurotic symptoms. There have been several reports in the analytic literature on the impact of
lithium treatment on patients in psychoanalysis. We
know that one effect of lithium is to dampen the manically intensified libido of bipolar patients; often that
is one reason why some of these patients cease taking
the medication. But what effect does dampening libido
have on neurotic compromises based on dealing with
powerful libidinal impulses? Another instance concerns the effect of such drugs as Prozac and Anafranil

250

in reducing obsessional and compulsive behavior. If


psychoanalytic theory is correct that obsessional and
compulsive behavior is often a defense against hostile
impulses, then one might predict that the chemical
action of these drugs is to reduce the strength of hostile
impulses, as lithium"reduces libido. It might be possible to determine if the drug action is exactly in those
brain regions involved in aggression.
My point in offering these admittedly speculative
examples is to argue that it may not be necessary to
draw upon the full subtle range of analytically elicited
subjectivity to test a number of hypotheses of interest
to analysts and neuroscientists, although I would not
rule this alternative out as I will try to illustrate below.

Howard Shevrin
other affective states. The subliminal method allows us
to operationalize unconscious processing, the clinical
method draws upon the full richness of subjective
data, and the neurophysiological method provides both
a converging measure independent of the other two
methods and an entree into brain events.
In closing, I would like to say that the initial position papers and subsequent commentaries and responses have considerably enriched my knowledge
and stimulated many ideas and new possibilities. I
hope my comments have been of comparable interest
to others.

Downloaded by [Gazi University] at 06:34 18 August 2014

References
Some Suggestions for an Empirically Based
Convergence of Psychoanalytic and
Neuroscience Methods
In their concluding remarks Solms and Nersessian cite
a way in which psychoanalytic and neuroscience approaches can be integrated by drawing upon neuropsychological lesion studies through which certain
hypotheses can be tested bearing on psychoanalytic
dream theory as contrasted with alternate theories.
This is proving to be a rich and rewarding approach
and is methodologically similar to the approach illustrated above concerning the hypothetical working of
lithium, Prozac, and Anafranil. But these approaches
do not deal directly with the analytic clinical situation
as Green underscores. Panksepp would like to draw
on the richness of subjective experience elicited in
the treatment situation itself. We have made a first
approach to addressing this problem.
In our research we have combined clinical, cognitive, and neurophysiological methods with encouraging results (Shevrin, Willimas, Marshall, Hertel, Bond,
and Brakel, 1992; Shevrin, Bond, Brakel, Hertel, and
Williams, 1996). We have been able to track electrophysiologically stimuli related to unconscious conflict
and conscious symptom experience presented supraand subliminally. The stimuli have been selected from
a series of in-depth" clinical interviews conducted in
the context of a psychodynamic evaluation. Thus far
we have relied on the event-related potential as the
neurophysiological marker. It is entirely possible to
combine this electrophysiological marker with neuroimaging to establish patterns of localization, with skin
conductance responses to measure sympathetic activation (see Wong, Shevrin, and Williams [1994] for such
evidence), and with biochemical markers of stress and

Bernat, E., Bunce, S., & Shevrin, H. (submitted), Eventrelated potentials differentiate positive and negative
mood adjectives during both supraliminal and subliminal
visual processing.
Berridge, K. C~, & Robinson, T. (1995), The mind of an
addicted brain: Neural sensitization of wanting versus
liking. Curro Direct. Psycholog. Sci., 4:71-76.
Shevrin, H. (1997), Psychoanalysis as the patient: High in
feeling, low in energy. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn.,
45:841-864.
- - - (1998), Why do we need to be conscious? A psychoanalytic answer. In: Advanced Personality, ed. D. F.
Barone, M. Hersen, & V. B. Van Hasselt. New York:
Plenum Press.
- - Bond, J. A., Brakel, L. A., Hertel, R. K., & Williams,
W. J. (1996), Conscious and Unconscious Processes: Psychodynamic, Cognitive, and Neurophysiological Convergences. New York: Guilford Press.
- - - Toussieng, P. (1965), Vicissitudes of the need for
tactile stimulation in instinctual development. In: The
Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 20:310-339. New
York: International Universities Press.
- - Williams, W. J., Marshall, R. E., Hertel, R. K.,
Bond, J. A., & Brakel, L. A. (1992), Event-related potential indicators of the dynamic unconscious. Consciousness & Cognit., 1:340-366.
Wong, P., Shevrin, H., & Williams, W. J. (1994), Conscious
and unconscious processes: An ERP index of an anticipatory response in a visual masking paradigm. Psychophysiology, 31:87-101.

Howard Shevrin
Department of Psychiatry
University of Michigan Medical Center
Riverview Building
900 Wall Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48105
e-mail: shevrin@ umich. edu

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi