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VII. A. NEUROBIOLOGY OF DRIVES AND AFFECTS The connection between the drive/affect and object is approached in the recent synthetic work of Otto Kernberg (2015b), correlating the drives, affective systems and object relations theory of personality and development with neurobiological development and activity. In view of recent neuroscientific discoveries of Wright and Panksepp (2014) of the SEEKING system, Kernberg updates the Freudian dual-drive theory, referring to it as a supraordinate integration of the SEEKING system, which he now sees as a basic drive that couples with both rewarding and aversive affective systems . Further drawing on Wright and Panksepp (2014), Krause (2012) and others, Kernberg (2015) postulates the integration of the major primary affects into several affective systems. Major primary affects, including joyfulness, rage, disgust, surprise, fear, sadness and sensual excitement, emerge in the first few weeks and months of life. They 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, Brian Johnson (2008), too, has held SEEKING as a contemporary version of Freudian drive. Reviewing earlier work of Panksepp (1998), 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 of 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 (2001) in his “Pulsiones de vida y muerte” (Life and death drives). According to Medina, drives
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