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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 would be the organization of ‘forces in the service of organic life and death, which seek to reestablish an order and a state of interrelation and movement with other forces (opposing charges, antimatter and/or antiparticles), 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 contemporary scientific studies of 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, cancelled, or regulated apart from the molecular presence, absence, transport, division, development and destruction? A complex answer may be 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, in service of both living or dying. Medina contends that the Freudian proposal of a biological aspect of the death drive, finds support in contemporary bolological research: just as there are murderous and apoptotic cells, there are also apoptotic genes with their proteins; in other words, there are pro and anti- life programs, and in this way, one could understand the life and death drives from the perspective of molecular biology and psychoanalysis.
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