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expressions of the life drive can perhaps transform the common empirical object (a reflection of the death drive) as the subject of acts and not of words, into an esthetic object.
VII. INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES
To advance his theoretical progress, Freud frequently called upon other fields, such as biological sciences, anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, art, literature, etc., basing himself on their analogical links without confusing them. Accordingly, there is a wide acknowledgement within the contemporary psychoanalytic discourse that if the differences between the fields of inquiry with their different methodologies and terminologies are recognized and not confused, the interdisciplinary connections, applications, and cross- fertilization between psychoanalysis and other fields of inquiry can lead to fertile analogies and new hypotheses. 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
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