Neuro-Evolutionary Foundations of Infant Minds: From Psychoanalytic Visions of How Primal Emotions Guide Constructions of Human Minds toward Affective Neuroscientific Understanding of Emotions and Their Disorders

ABSTRACT

As Louis Sander understood, human infants are evolutionarily endowed with emotional minds that allow them to experience themselves as affectively vibrant creatures, who seek to be recognized as important players in the world. If so recognized, they experience themselves as positive individuals; if merely neglected as predetermined beings whose affects and intentions do not matter in the long-term construction of their minds, paths toward adult disturbance are paved. The neuroscience of affective processes has been substantively advancing through the use of animal models where the needed detailed experimental work can be conducted. Critical neural networks and neuro-epigenetic brain changes are being documented that provide neuroscientific confirmations for the insights advanced by Sander and his many colleagues. Here we show how the deeply intersubjective, flexible nature of the mother-infant relationship is firmly expressed in the underlying biology of the basic limbic emotional systems. Rather than being deterministic, hard-wired affective switches, these emotional systems (e.g., CARE, PLAY, PANIC, SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, and LUST) are modulated by (and, in turn, modify) the developing relationship between mother and infant. Thus, the nature-nurture debate can be meaningfully reconceptualized as a bio-psycho-social interactive model, in which biology shapes relationships, which, in turn, shape and sometimes radically modify the biology.

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Notes on contributors

Jaak Panksepp

Jaak Panksepp, the founder of Affective Neuroscience and one of the world’s leading psychobiologists, was a mentor, an inspiration, and a friend to all of us. His well-researched and creative vision of the development of human and animal emotional life will remain his lasting contribution to psychology and to the neurosciences. He tragically died on April 17, 2017. We dedicate this article to his memory with love and sorrow.

Andrea Clarici

Andrea Clarici is a psychoanalyst/psychotherapist from Triest, Italy. He is Professor in Advanced Dynamic Psychology at the Faculty of Psychology and of Child Neuropsychiatry at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Trieste. He is chief coordinator of the Centro di Formazione e Ricerca in Psicoterapia Psicoanalitica in Triest. He has translated into Italian, works by Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven, Karen Kaplan-Solms and Mark Solms, and Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull, all books published by Raffaello Cortina Publisher (Milan).

Marie Vandekerckhove

Marie Vandekerckhove is clinician and associate professor at the Department of Clinical and Lifespan Psychology at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Her research has led to publications in the areas of sleep, emotion regulation and affective neuroscience.

Yoram Yovell

Yoram Yovell is a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and supervising psychoanalyst. He is associate professor of clinical psychiatry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He studies the neurobiology of mental pain and its relation to suicidality, with the aim of improving the treatment of suicidal individuals