IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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Berridge and Robinson (2003), Shevrin (2003), Schore (2003), and many others, he pursues Freud’s (1920) observation of a force “…more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle …” (p. 23), by an examination of the neural pathways and signaling apparatus that underlie drive, pleasure, and cathexis. He posits a neuropsychoanalytic theory where emotional health is facilitated by the alignment of drive and pleasure, while neurosis is driven by urgently wanting relationships that cause pain and frustration based on a misalignment of two distinct neural systems. Within this framework, concepts of repetition compulsion and death instinct are adventitious. In his later publication, Johnson (2010) demonstrates how understanding the neurobiology that underlies metapsychology can facilitate more accurate models of human functioning that guide psychoanalytic interventions. Employing Panksepp’s notions of ‘separation-panic’ and the ventral tegmental dopaminergic SEEKING systems, he presents analysis of a patient addicted to heroin. After analyzing the disordered ‘panic’ system, the patient was able to tolerate craving in his SEEKING system without using heroin for nine years after analysis ended. Mark Solms (2020, 2021) also has redefined the concept of drive as related to affects in the light of his general integrating model linking contemporary neuroscience and psychoanalytic theory. Based upon the formulation Panksepp (1998) and Friston (2010), Solms designates as drive the pressure for work that salience of affect induces in the central nervous system so that there are, at least, as many drives as there are affective systems. Original hypotheses, contemplating linkage between molecular biology, immunology and psychoanalysis were put forth by Latin American analyst Guillermo Sánchez Medina . In his in” Pulsiones de vida y muerte ” (Medina 2001) (Life and death drives). According to Medina, drives would be the organization of ‘forces for organic life and death, which seek to reestablish an order and a state of interrelation and movement with other forces (opposing charges, anti-matter and/or anti-particles), which disturb this functioning or, on the contrary, preserve balance and order, which also leads us into the theory of complexity and chaos’. Based on different scientific texts and research papers on the immune system, apoptosis and immunology, Sánchez Medina tries to ‘account for instinctive bioenergetic natural phenomena, attempting at a proposal and not at a parallel, at finding a bridge that connects with the interpretation of psychobiological facts, obviously originating in molecular biology, the discoveries of immunology and the discoveries of psychoanalysis, which, once integrated, can possible allow the construction of another bridge for the comprehension of the somatic and the psychic. How can these biological forces be stimulated, canceled, or regulated apart from the molecular presence, absence, transport, division, development and destruction? An answer, worth considering, is that the same psychic stimuli, originating in conscious or unconscious phantasies can awaken, produce, or accelerate signals that interconnect the different biomolecular mechanisms and, in this way, establish the psyche-soma bridge; both for living or for dying and which is part of the psycho-affective emotional configuration with its regulatory functions. Psychoanalysis has already studied the drive and the thanatic phantasies and can in turn be an axis for the comprehension of the psycho-physical concept and the

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