Integrating the Psychoanalytic and Neurobiological Views of Panic Disorder

Abstract

To facilitate cross-talk between current neuroscientific and psychoanalytic views, it is useful to deal with areas of common ground. One such domain is the neural and behavioral basis of anxiety, a relatively well-understood area of study, which has received substantial interest from both neuroscience and psychoanalysis over the years, especially as regards topics such as fear conditioning and uncontrollable anxiety. This paper focuses on the unconscious “learning” processes, which are well-known to psychoanalysis but are also described increasingly in neuroscientific terms. Panic disorder—one of the manifestations of anxiety that has received most attention from both psychoanalytic theory and neuroscience—especially lends itself to scrutiny under the classical conditioning lens. This paper highlights the long work of synthesis that is still required to provide a more complete account that makes both neuroscientific and psychoanalytic sense—but which is ultimately necessary for the future of psychiatry.