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IV. Ab. Biological Correlates of Anxiety Disorders, Panic and Phobias; and Borderline Personality Disorder Studies attempting to integrate the psychoanalytic and neurobiological views of panic disorders and phobias have focused on mapping neuroanatomical pathways involved in the subliminal learning (and unlearning) paradigm, based on classical conditioning, which might be psychoanalytically translated as a ‘transformation of traumatic anxiety into signal anxiety’. Underlying dynamic conflicts around separation, psychic helplessness, aggression, approach/avoidance, fight/flight and their neurobiological correlates (irregularities in functioning of the amygdala and the Orbitofrontal/Prefrontal Cortex) were tracked in real time with the help of neuroimaging technology. Alexander, Feigelson and Gorman (2005) theorized that especially the interaction between amygdala and hippocampus was implicated as “a locus of unconscious fear memories that Freud described….” (p.140). They refer to continuity between Freud’s two models of anxiety as the theoretical superstructure helpful in conceptual understanding of such problems. A proposed model of the neurobiological correlates of object relations theory , using Borderline Personality Disorder as a paradigm, was put forth by Kernberg (2015). Drawing on Wright and Panksepp (2014), Krause (2012) and others, he postulates the integration of the major primary affects into several affective systems. Major primary affects emerge in the first few weeks and months of life. These primary affects include joyfulness, rage, disgust, surprise, fear, sadness and sensual excitement. Affects are grouped into systems of eroticism, play- bonding, fight-flight, attachment, separation-panic, and SEEKING. SEEKING (Wright and Panksepp, 2014) is a basic nonspecific motivation for stimulus gratification, which may attach itself to any of the other affective systems. Because of its lack of specificity, some have held SEEKING as a contemporary version of Freudian drive (Johnson, 2008). According to Panksepp and Kernberg, SEEKING provides the basic explanation as to why, under particular conditions, there may be an excessive activation of aggressive or affiliative affective systems. From a psychoanalytic point of view, affects as primary motivating systems raise questions regarding the extent to which drives are constituted by the integration of corresponding positive (‘libidinal’) and negative (‘aggressive’) affects , and the extent to which the affects are the expression of these assumed corresponding drives . Affects initiate the interaction between self and other, and the internalization of these interactions (in the form of affective memory) determines the internalized models of behavior (in attachment terminology), or internalized object relations (in psychoanalytic object relations theory language). Positive and negative affect activating brain structures are separate from each other. The integration of positive and negative affects only occurs at a higher level of limbic structures and involves cortico-limbic interaction. The gradual integration of emotionally opposite conditions leads to an integrated sense of self and the others, effecting the ‘normal ego identity’, and the shift from borderline personality organization towards neurotic personality organization, marked by the shift from primitive defensive operations, centering on splitting, towards advanced defensive operations centering on repression. This advanced level of personality development is reflected in a clear delimitation of a repressed dynamic unconscious, or the ID, constituted by unacceptable
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