THE NEW YORK PSYCHOANALYTIC SOCIETY & INSTITUTE:
Arnold Pfeffer Center for Neuropsychoanalysis
247 East 82nd St., between 2nd & 3rd, NY, NY
Saturday, June 5, 2010
10 a.m.
Yoram Yovell, M.D., Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Faculty of Social Welfare and Health Sciences at the University of Haifa, Israel;
Director of ISAN (Institute for the Study of Affective Neuroscience) University of Haifa
Anxiety: One or Two?
Discussant: Mark Solms, Ph.D.
Anxiety is a key concept in psychoanalytic theory and practice, as well as a ubiquitous phenomenon in everyday life. From the very beginning, Freud made anxiety a key element in his models of the mind. In formulating his second theory of anxiety, he proposed a distinction between painful and painless anxiety, and this distinction was later elaborated and expanded by Melanie Klein. Most current neurobiological accounts of anxiety link it to activity in the neural circuits underlying the emotion of fear, centering on the amygdala. Anxiety is thought to involve chronic activation or sensitization of the amygdala, making it more responsive to inputs and therefore generating anxiety inappropriately, sending stronger output signals and therefore generating more fearful affect than necessary, or both. However, certain forms of anxiety, particularly those which drive patients to psychoanalysis and psychodynamic therapy, may involve activity in a separate (though interacting) circuit which mediates separation distrless. From an evolutionary perspective, these two circuits are involved with sensing different kinds of dangers (e.g., attack by predators versus abandonment by caregivers) and generating different kinds of behaviors (freezing or fleeing, on the one hand; crying and attempts to reunite with the caregiver, on the other). In addition, these circuits, which were studied in animals by Panksepp and others, were found to be differentially modulated by different neurotransmitters and peptides, and their malfunction in humans may lead to different clinical and intrapsychic manifestations that may be of interest to psychoanalysts.
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