The 18th congress of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society had a special session dedicated to Jaak Panksepp's memory, which took place during the time that Jaak was scheduled to speak. Some of his friends and collaborators were asked to share some words about his life and work: Oliver Turnbull, Ken Davis, Yoram Yovell, Mark Solms, and Bonny Astor. What follows are revised versions of the spoken, heartfelt presentations during that session. We also asked two other close friends of Jaak, David Pincus and Doug Watt, who were not able to travel to London to join us, to contribute to this set of memorial essays.
Words are never good enough to express feelings, but some of us who had the great honor of sharing a few years of Jaak's life felt that we owed him a special record of his numerous and relevant contributions to the scientific study of emotions. He redefined consciousness and affects with his seven basic emotion systems. He sensitized many researchers about the features that all mammals share. His legacy is of undoubted importance and was a known fact before his passing. What seems most important is for us to remember the extraordinary human being that he was. Few people are so spontaneously generous and kind even when they are so busy, as Jaak was. His words and smile encouraged others to engage in their own endeavors. It was his own story transmitted through emotion, the topic that he knew most about. An emotionally moved audience in London had the chance to mourn and cry together. That day we acknowledged that a brilliant mind had left us, and that he had touched many hearts deeply. For all he left to us, we owe it to him to honor his memory by further developing and researching the contributions of affective neuroscience.
The study of the MindBrain will have forever changed after your work. Thank you, Jaak Panksepp!
Daniela Flores Mosri
In addition to the moving reflections from his friends and colleagues, we are also very honored to include a piece by Anesa Miller, Jaak's wife. She was his staunch supporter through his many illnesses, but most importantly, his companion in a life that included travel, intellectual and cultural pursuits, and close ties to their children and extended family. As Anesa is a gifted writer, we are grateful for the intimate glimpse of their partnership in her poignant contribution.
Maggie Zellner
Oliver Turnbull
As we all know, the wonderful Jaak Panksepp passed away suddenly in April this year, following a decade-long battle with cancer.
He was scheduled to speak, in this very slot, in our London conference, as indeed he had spoken in each of our previous conferences, for almost two decades. So the planning committee decided to use the opportunity to turn his conference slot into a memorial event, to celebrate Jaak's life.
We have four speakers planned. Firstly, we have Ken Davis, who knew Jaak for decades, and will speak on Jaak's earlier life and his time at Bowling Green State University. This is followed by Yoram Yovell, who co-authored a remarkable study on opioids and suicidality with Jaak. Yoram will speak on Jaak's basic emotion systems, especially on their significance as the “foundation” science of both clinical psychiatry and clinical psychopharmacology, and indeed how they make sense, and bring order, to so many disparate fields.
Then Mark Solms will speak of Jaak in relation to neuropsychoanalysis. Ours is a field – and indeed a community – where I think Jaak found a warm and welcoming home, after decades of challenge and difficulty with his scientific peers. I am hoping that Mark will capture both the scientific, and the human, side of that journey.
Finally, we have Bonny Astor. She is here partly because, as one of the younger members of our community, Bonny represents the future. And heaven knows, Jaak was all about the future. But we especially wanted Bonny because she has some remarkable video material, to remind us of the vividness of Jaak in life.
Ken Davis
I am very grateful for this opportunity to share some thoughts about Jaak here at the Congress of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society. So many here were friends of Jaak, and I imagine that some of my feelings about Jaak will resonate with yours.
Jaak was an interesting person in many ways. He went to a small “one-room school” in rural Delaware with 11 pupils until he was about 14, when his family moved to New Jersey; I believe many of his affinities and characteristics may have reflected this humble rural beginning. He had originally thought he might be an engineer, and in his early years at BGSU he was a bit of a geek. He had one of the first video recorders. He also managed to connect an IBM electric typewriter to an early Radio Shack computer to create the first word processor I ever saw. However, he was also sociable and enjoyed having people over in his backyard for cookouts. While his outdoor grill may have become less active in later years, anyone who had the pleasure of visiting Jaak at his BG home in the summer is likely familiar with his and Anesa's front porch, where he liked to sit and chat while saying hello, by name, to the occasional passing neighbor.
Jaak's life was not without personal trauma. His cheerleader daughter, Tiina, was killed in a car accident by a drunk driver when she was 16 years old, a shock I do not believe he was ever completely able to come to terms with. He featured her profile as the logo for the Lost Children autism foundation that he organized. Tiina was also mentioned in Affective Neuroscience and Archeology of the Mind. She was buried in Bowling Green, and it was important for him to visit her grave whenever returning there.
My first memory of Jaak is of a very nice, young professor who had very interesting new ideas. I had worked with J. P. Scott, who was known for canine behavior genetics. However, my graduate school career was interrupted by the Vietnam War. When at BGSU, Dr. Scott decided to retire, and asked Jaak if he would take me on as his student and help guide me through a dissertation. I had been doing canine research in Scott's BGSU dog lab and Jaak encouraged me to pursue a project using dogs. Fortunately, our first idea on “anticipatory responses” worked out less well than we had hoped – I say this because we ended up opening up more interesting lines of research.
One of Jaak's students had just worked out the key nodes of the PANIC/Sadness system using guinea pigs, and Jaak was interested in exploring related work with dogs. These were the early days of the opioid hypothesis’, which was one of Jaak's many early ideas: namely, that opioids were closely linked to mammalian social motivation. We finally settled on a plan to study the effects of morphine and the opioid blocker, naloxone, on the social motivation and behavior of dogs, which turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made.
At BGSU, I took a class offered by Jaak taught on electrical brain stimulation. Jaak was encouraging but did not try to “sell” his ideas, and I do not think many of us fully grasped what he had already accomplished or anticipated what he would eventually achieve. We treated him like another very bright teacher, a relationship he encouraged with the same open, unassuming manner many of you had come to appreciate, and throughout his life he was as kind to a student as he was to an accomplished professional colleague.
I likewise did not fully appreciate Jaak in those early days. I, of course, knew he was very bright. Dr. Bob Conner, one of Jaak's good friends, who eventually became head of the psychology department at BGSU, once said that he had no idea how Jaak could keep track of so much information, which sent home the message that people I thought of as being very bright were also in awe of Jaak's intellect.
In this vein, I recall that Jaak and another bright young tenured professor at BGSU both had MRI whole brain scans performed on them. The other professor was deflated that Jaak had a noticeably larger hippocampus, which may have validated Conner's earlier observations about Jaak's extraordinary mental capacities. Indeed, Jaak had a vast appetite for all things intellectual. In his later years at BGSU, he was invited to become part of Mike Brady's philosophical reading group, and he seemed to fit in just like he was another one of the philosophy faculty members.
In my own career, I soon found myself starving to death teaching at a small college in Ohio, and made the difficult decision to take a job in industry requiring a psychological shift into personality work, a job that took me to North Carolina and Europe. In Jaak's words, I disappeared for a while, but I gradually started showing up in BG again from time to time. However, it was not Jaak's intellectual prowess that increased the frequency of me showing up on his and Anesa's front porch. It was the same warm, welcoming nature that so many of you in this room have also personally experienced.
I did not just experience this in our personal relationship. I also witnessed Jaak's generous, caring disposition after his close friend Bob Connor's untimely stroke and death, and again after the death of Dr. Scott. Jaak later took it on himself to organize a memorial conference honoring Dr. Scott's work, and also led to the foundation of the JP Scott Center for Neuroscience, Mind, and Behavior. He also volunteered his time working with Alcoholics Anonymous groups. In addition, he interacted with countless parents of autistic children via the “Lost Children” foundation. As you can see, Jaak CAREd about people – as was again exemplified by his attempt to diligently answer his “mountain” of emails he continually received from students, professionals, and laypeople all around the world, even after diagnosed with cancer.
The first time I fully realized the extent of Jaak's exceptional accomplishments was when, on one of my trips to BG, he presented me with one of the red and green pre-print copies of his monumental work, Affective Neuroscience. It was only in reading this early version of of the book that I began to fully comprehend the awesome grasp of his intellect, the vast breadth and depth of his knowledge and research, and the potential impact of his theories of emotion.
Once again, he became my professor and intellectual anchor. I started going to conferences with him, and we worked on several projects centering around the affective neuroscience of personality. However, more than working on the projects, most of all, Nancy and I enjoyed hanging out with Jaak and often with his wife Anesa, as I know many of you have also experienced. I know many in this room also feel they have suddenly lost a trusted colleague and professional anchor, and what is pressing on all of our hearts today is simply missing this wonderful, giant of a man.
Yoram Yovell
It's almost a cliché that people live on as long as their memory lives on in the hearts of the people who have known them. I think that's true for pretty much everybody. But there are some fortunate people who live on for decades, centuries, and sometimes millennia, after they’re gone, because their ideas live on. Their contribution lives on. It's always tough to speculate, but I would think that when people look back on the history of biological science, neuroscience, and, indeed, neuropsychoanalysis 50, 100, who knows how many years from now – Jaak and his contribution will be there.
My task is to talk about Jaak's contribution to neuroscience and to clinical psychiatry. I remember clearly reading Affective Neuroscience for the first time. I think what makes a scientific work profound is that it makes you look at a phenomenon that you’ve known before, and see it in a different light. That was something that I experienced – as I think many people here did – when I first got the sense of Jaak's work. I was exposed to it when I had already finished my PhD in neuroscience and my MD; I think was even done with my residency as a psychiatrist. I remember that feeling – which I also had when I read Mark Solms for the first time – of things falling into place, things coming together with an ability to create an overarching theory to make sense of this sea of facts that are generated so fast and so voluminously in science, and make a theory out of it. The ability to go away from the data and look at the big picture – not that he ever strayed from the facts; he was, to his last day, with his hands in a wet lab – but to go up from the level of the specifics, and to add something new. I think that is what he did.
I know most of us are very familiar with Jaak's model of the seven emotional systems, but I thought I would just reiterate it a little bit, because I think those seven systems really are the basic science of psychiatry and psychology. I believe that you cannot understand clinical phenomena without them, and it will be very hard to develop psychiatry and psychology where they need to go without their contribution. I think the same is true for psychoanalysis.
I will briefly just go over with you those seven emotional systems that Jaak elucidated. Some of them he discovered, and some of them he's written about, based on the work of others.
Jaak took the evidence of these basic emotional systems into realms like cognitive psychology, where there were many people who doubted their existence. Jaak came into that picture, and immediately changed it by looking not only at the neurochemistry of those affects, but their place in the neuroaxis, and indeed their place in the human mind. Jaak promoted the important idea that carrying the animal origins of the mind inside our own does not make us savage; paradoxically, it's a lot of what makes us human.
As summarized in the famous Watt & Panksepp table, his approach really set the stage for a lot of research. Basically, clinical psychiatry and clinical psychopharmacology – both the pathogenesis and the drugs that we use – all fit very nicely inside this table. And there is a lot of interest in this; for example, Shahar Arzy, who is responsible for the neuroscience curriculum for the medical students at the medical school where I teach, and I are talking about taking the affective neuroscience course and moving it from introductory medicine to psychiatry. It's basic neuroscience that we think should be part and parcel of everybody who studies both neuroscience and psychiatry.
Last, I would like to go over those emotional systems and reflect on what in them was in Jaak.
The SEEKING system is a very good place to start.Footnote1 He had this ceaseless curiosity, this tremendous enthusiasm, this incredible energy. And I think these things carry the science forward. His formulation of the SEEKING system, I think, was a very astute contribution, looking at the differences that Kent Berridge later formulated as wanting versus liking. Giving what had previously been called the “reward system” an anatomical and a conceptual basis was a huge contribution. Jaak's ability to enjoy things, to really savor them and enjoy them, was certainly there.
As was his ability to take CARE of people. I think this is something that everyone here who has known him knows about – his tendency to sacrifice his own good for the wellbeing of others, and for the care of others. Which is really what binds us together, this CARE that was something deeply in him. Also very much in him was the PANIC/GRIEF system, as you’ve heard; his formulation of this system was another major contribution. This system is all about the understanding of what it means to have someone, to love someone, and to lose someone. Looking at his reaction to the loss of Tiina, we know that he had it in him.
About FEAR: I will say that I know there must have been situations where Jaak was afraid, but I have to say that I never saw him in this kind of FEAR. Maybe people here did. I’m sure he wasn't fearless, but if he was afraid of something, I didn't see it. The fears that he did have, I think, had to do with fears of loss. Again, this is an example of where he gave a new meaning and a new understanding to, for example, Melanie Klein's distinction between the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position. The evidence clearly points to two kinds of fears in the mammalian brain, two kinds of anxieties: anxieties about annihilation, and anxieties about loss of love and loss of loved ones, which is entirely different. This distinction is something that has come up clearly from his model, that just has enormous explanatory power.
RAGE. Jaak was not the most calm, collected person in the world. We’ve seen him upset. We’ve seen him acquire many enemies in the scientific world. I’m sure Mark is going to relate more of that later, but I think that if Jaak had been a more politically correct person, no doubt that he might already have been given a Nobel Prize for Medicine for his really seminal contribution to neuroscience. For example, Oliver Turnbull and I were editors of this journal, Neuropsychoanalysis, and I remember that we had to do some damage control when Jaak was a reviewer or a responder to papers, because of his tendency to be a bit vociferous. But one thing that we also knew about him is that he could reconcile, he could take an ex-enemy and make them into real friends.
And last, but not least, Jaak was PLAYful. And I think that that playfulness, and the idea that this is part and parcel of the human condition to be cherished and sacred, is one more contribution that he had for us. Thank you very much.
Mark Solms
When I was faced with the question of what to say during this memorial session for Jaak Panksepp, I had an unmanageable flood of thoughts that I could tell you about. I will start with two points about Jaak's life which I think are significant that have not yet been mentioned.
The first is that when he was a small child, Jaak made a traumatic escape from Estonia after it had become part of the Soviet bloc; his father, who was a landowner, was known to be not very Bolshevik, and so they had to flee. During this journey, Jaak fell ill due to severe burns, and his life was saved by opiates (which stopped his incessant crying). Perhaps it's just serendipity, but it is truly an incredible thing to link this event with the fact that he went on to make profound, really world-changing discoveries about the role of opioids in attachment bonding.
I do not think anybody could have given a better characterization of who Jaak really was than Ken did, in his moving remarks. To anyone who did not know him, he was just as Ken described him. As Yoram said subsequently, some of Jaak's most prominent characteristics were his attachment, his relatedness, his humanity (But he was also deeply related to other mammals, too, so perhaps “humanity” is not entirely a good word for it.). He was a mammal who knew about the importance of love, and of the bond to others. I had the great privilege of spending time with him on safari in Africa, observing him directly relating to our fellow creatures, and not only mammals – he seemed to have every bit as much love for birds, and every other living thing we came across.
What he did not have much love for was some of his colleagues. When Yoram went through the different basic emotions, he said, correctly, that Jaak was not without aggression. But what Jaak was without was bullshit. He was not narcissistic. He did not know how to play the academic game. And he didn't want to. The consequences of this, I think, left him very bitter. It really upset him deeply. Because he was such a good person, and so good at his work, he hadn't planned for the possibility that people might not want to recognize, not acknowledge, not champion the self-evident fact of other animals being conscious and having feelings; he couldn't fathom how some colleagues could not change their minds in the face of the oodles of evidence that he and his students generated, as to how emotions really work. Jaak thought that science was simply about finding the truth and communicating it. Few of you can imagine how many studies Jaak's students did that he never even published. Once he had discovered something, once he had his findings, that was all he wanted. Whereas so many of us will turn one finding into 20 publications, Jaak would have one publication for every 20 findings. He was really a truth-loving scientist.
The second biographical point was the importance of Tiina's death for his change of gear in terms of what he was doing in science. He was already facing opposition, realizing that his point of view – that affect was really about feeling, about subjective states, rather than just about behaviors and the neurochemistry and circuitry of behaviors – was not going to win him friends and influence people. He was no fool. He realized this was not going to be a good career move. But he thought, after Tiina's death, “To hell with it, I am doing it anyway. This is too important. This is what matters in life.” Feelings, feelings, feelings. This is what it's all about. It's the bedrock of mental life.
As I said, the fact that Jaak's colleagues couldn't see that left him really bitter. But also, I think, defeated. It became a kind of a neurotic symptom with him. We saw this because, as the field started to change, and as we all started to recognize the absolute brilliance of his ideas, it became apparent that the future is Jaak's – he seemed unable to recognize that. As Yoram was saying, the future of psychiatry and psychopharmacology, the future of affective science, the future of neuropsychoanalysis, the whole future of mental science, has Jaak written all over it. But he did not see that, and that is very sad. He was traumatized and couldn't move on. When I saw him putting his foot in it, again and again and again, and tried to talk to him about his tendency to endlessly belabor his campaign against behaviorism – when it was no longer necessary – I would question him, “Is this really in your best interest? Do you not think there might be a better strategy now?” Jaak didn't get strategy. But that also proves that CBT does not work. [Laughter.]
Now, a more personal reflection on Jaak's impact on our field. I trained in neuropsychology in the early 1980s. I had just come across Freud's “Project,” and I asked my Professor where I could turn for contemporary views on the sorts of things that Freud was grappling with in 1895. He pointed me to a book which was the new thing in neuropsychology at the time, by Heilman and Satz, called The Neuropsychology of Human Emotion (1984); and I regret to say that it was absolute crap. I thought, “Oh my God, we’ve gone backwards in a hundred years.” And then I read a chapter in The Handbook of Clinical Neurology, the great multi-volume bible of neurology: in the Second Series, which was published in 1986, there was a chapter by Jaak Panksepp, whom I’d never heard of. It was an absolute revelation, that paper. So, I started to correspond with him in the early nineties. I invited him over to New York, where I was convening a lecture series that eventually became the Arnold Pfeffer Center for Neuropsychoanalysis at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and saw immediately how genuine and good he was as a person and as a scientist. What an absolutely brilliant mind he was. There are a few people who have really shaped my own career, who are truly heroes to me. One sat here in our conference yesterday – Karl Friston, who is an incredible mind, and the latest great influence upon me. The first was Aleksandr Luria. Then there was, of course, Sigmund Freud. And Jaak was the third. Of at least equal caliber.
When I saw what kind of person he was – and it's not accidental that such a mensch studied and understood affectivity and emotion in the way that he did – I then asked him to engage in a dialogue in print in our first issue of Neuropsychoanalysis. Ed Nersessian and I published a paper entitled “Freud's Theory of Affect: Questions for Neuroscience” (1999), and Jaak was the person who answered the questions. Since it went so swimmingly, I then asked him to speak at our first congress in London in 2000.
Ever since then, Jaak was centrally involved in the neuropsychoanalytic movement. That year he was elected (with me) the co-chair of our new International Neuropsychoanalysis Society. He attended, barring illness, every single congress since then, and was meant to be here speaking to you right now. He was completely attached to our Society, to us as a movement, and as a scientific approach.
Although, I have to say, I do not think Jaak ever really understood a lot about psychoanalysis. I think what really appealed to him was that we did not shy away from the actual stuff of mental life, from feeling, from relationships, from the real things that matter. Of course, we cannot avoid it – that's what we deal with in psychoanalysis. So he felt a real affinity with us, in contradistinction to his neuroscientific colleagues, who (he never missed an opportunity to tell us) were actually closet behaviorists. He would say, “Don't you know? The behaviorists didn't die, they all kept their jobs and became neuroscientists.” And he could not bear it. We were his antidote to that. And I think, to be honest, that some of Jaak's wildest speculations, the ones that Ken referred to, his therapeutic proposals, arose partly because he didn't know what the hell he was talking about when it came to clinical work. And that is something you can't blame him for. But it was also because he felt so liberated with us. I think he just thought: here, anything goes. He was so free and happy, intellectually, in our presence.
He did ask me some questions early on which sort of worried me. Like, “What's this business about the unconscious? Why are you guys so concerned with it?” Apparently, he was really suspicious that we might actually be behaviorists too (as I said, he was traumatized!). These kinds of questions floored me in my early years with him. However, once I came to better understand the way consciousness works in relation to the more primitive layers of the mind, which led to my own ideas about “The Conscious Id” (Solms, 2013), then I understood what the scientific problems were that Jaak had with the psychoanalytical model of the mind. But he did not want to fight with us about this, because he had enough fights on his plate.
There is a great deal else that I can tell you, but I will just add a few closing points. I should mention that it isn't correct to say that he was ill for a decade. In fact, when we had our first congress in this very city, in 2000, he wrote to me in 1999 (or 1998) already, saying, “I am sorry, Mark, I am not sure I will be able to make the congress because I have just been diagnosed with lung cancer.” At that time, it was feared to be a small cell carcinoma. When it turned out to be a lymphoma, he was so happy. He called it a “limpoma.” So we had him at the congress. But, you know – not to be too melodramatic about it – we all knew what the long-term prognosis was. We knew he was fighting, from then onwards, for his life.
When it recurred, and when he had that subsequent massive bout of chemo, we have to be honest: he was never quite the same again after that. He never quite had the same intellectual grip on things, and he tended to become a bit repetitive, and so on; but it didn't matter, because Jaak remained an encyclopedia of neuroscience. I will say one more thing about that: you know how disdainful he was about the cortex, so as his cortex started faltering, it made little difference to him!
The last thing I want to say is that one of the great pleasures for me was when Jaak and I were appointed as scientific directors of the Hope for Depression Research Foundation in New York, endowed by Audrey Gruss. She was really ambitious. She wanted to cure depression. “You guys have got to cure it now, give me the cure for depression. Yes, I will fund you generously, but you and your colleagues must eradicate it. Use all the technologies you can find”, etc. Jaak and I were not quite the correct scientific directors for her, because we were interested in understanding what depression is really about, in all of its psychological complexity.
And so, in her frustration, she started buying in more and more experts, really cutting, thrusting scientists, who were going to cure depression. I saw Jaak wipe the floor with them, one after another, when it came to the actual science. But in terms of the political maneuvering, he was hopeless. So Jaak and I were eventually replaced as the directors of that research foundation, which, as far as I know, ever since then, didn't discover anything. The study you saw earlier, by Yoram, is a product of our tenure. It is one of the great hopes for a new kind of understanding of depression, both psychologically and neurochemically.
I know I have left out a great many things. I had to select from a flood of memories that came to my mind, but I am confident I’ve said the main things that I wanted to. Like all of you, I will miss Jaak terribly. I truly loved him, and love him. Thank you.
Bonny Astor
I want to start by saying that it's a real honor to be here to talk about one of my personal heroes and role models, and real inspiration in my life. It was very moving to hear the words of his close friends and colleagues.
I’m not going to say very much, because I want to show you some of an interview with Jaak that we carried out in 2015. It was a team effort by my dad, Richard Astor; Maggie Zellner, who you all know; my good friend, Chester Kaplan; and of course Jaak and his wife, Anesa. It was an amazing experience. We got to hang out in Tucson for a few days, and in a tiny town in Patagonia, Arizona. Those were four very memorable days of my life. The initial motivation – there were several motivations for this interview – was to ask Jaak some questions, complied by Mark, and begin recording a dialogue between the two of them. We also were providing some content for an online platform that the Neuropsychoanalysis Association is developing. Finally, we wanted to capture Jaak's enthusiastic, eloquent, and engaging way of presenting his work.
But I must say that the driving force behind this interview, and the reason that it happened when it did, was that my dad realized that someone very special, with a very important story to tell, might not be with us for much longer. And I think you’ll agree when you see these clips, that it's lucky that he did.
I’m going to show you three clips.Footnote2 The first one I think captures Jaak's open-minded and collaborative approach to science, and the reason that he valued our conferences and insights on psychoanalysis. The second clip, shows the way that Jaak grappled with some of the most difficult questions in science and in life, and how he contributed revolutionary insights to our understanding of consciousness. And in the third clip, I think you’ll see the positive affect – the enthusiasm (SEEKING), CARE, and PLAYfulness, that Jaak brought to his work, and shared with us in his presentations.
Before I show you these three clips, I just want to add to the comments that have already been made and express how truly fortunate I feel to have been exposed to Jaak's ideas. But most of all, to have had the opportunity to meet and get to know this remarkable and lovely man. Jaak's findings occupy a foundational position in my understanding of the world. They help me approach myself and others with more emotional intelligence. And in my work – I’m currently working at a mental health day center – I think about them every day. I’m sure many of you will have the same experiences, both personally and professionally, after reading and hearing Jaak's ideas.
So, I want to finish by expressing my deep gratitude to Jaak for his work, for sharing it with us. And my gratitude to you, this community, who recognize the value of this work and of this man.
I believe – and really hope – you will continue to preserve and build upon Jaak Panksepp's remarkable legacy. Thank you.
Doug Watt
I was doubly aggrieved when I was not able to make it to the London Congress to attend the Memorial Session there observed for Jaak. But I’m happy to have the chance to share in writing what I said on the occasion of his well-attended Memorial Service in Bowling Green this past April, and some other thoughts and reflections on Jaak's life and passing.
There I said,
Sometimes it just sneaks up on you how much you love and respect someone. As I get older it becomes clearer to me that love and connection are the only real things in human life, and that everything else is illusion, albeit sometimes a convincing one.
Although I suspected in our last Affective Neuroscience seminar (in January 2016 in Southwest Florida) that Jaak might be running out of time and that he might not be around in time for the next one in 2018-9, one is still never truly prepared for anyone you care about to pass away so suddenly. I came to take Jaak's encyclopedic knowledge, humor, and dedication to and leadership in the art and science of the mind/brain all quite for granted. The intellectual and professional void that his death suddenly created for me has been striking in its size, breadth, and depth. I face a remarkably impoverished sense of the last chunk of my professional career, although I have no doubts that I will succeed in reenergizing and refilling that career. But it will not be easy or any version of automatic, and there will be no doubt many, many times when the thought enters my head, wistfully, “Oh, dear God, how much I would love to run this one past Jaakito – what would he say?” Now I will have to both ask, and answer, such questions all by myself. Previously, it would have been some version of “hey Dougito – that's a great question … well,”. … followed by a pause, and then some very pithy and often very helpful and well framed associations that would usually send me scurrying off into digging out a rich vein of scientific ore for more material on those very subjects. Losing such an immense intellectual resource and such a great friend in the scientific process has been incredibly sad for me.
Over the course of knowing Jaak for over 20 years, I came to take quite for granted the many wonderful conference dinners, often characterized by spirited discussion, much humor, and gales of laughter, along with 6 or 7 week-long affective neuroscience seminars, and a goodly number of challenging book chapters and review articles, also full of spirited discussion and debate – as well as hundreds of humorous phone calls, and many impromptu curb-side consultations – all those are now gone and will not return. I certainly will go on to do other work, hopefully some of it with real merit, but I have lost someone who was decisively the most important influence in the second half of my professional career. It is clearly not possible to replace Jaak, but as many have commented, perhaps we can all become a bit more like Jaak, and this will surely, over time, help to soften the blow. I am certainly committed to mentoring the next generation of students, clinicians, and researchers in the same spirit that he did, and in this spirit, I have substantially increased my teaching commitments for the coming year, when I look forward very much to exposing young and curious minds to some of Jaak's penetrating and insightful concepts and work.
I count myself exceptionally fortunate in having had Jaak Panksepp as a dear colleague and friend. I just wish we could have one more dinner, with one more round of great stories and jokes at dinner, and just one more shared venture, perhaps just one more book chapter, and maybe, just maybe, one more seminar.
None of us will ever forget you, Jaakito.
David Pincus
I first met Jaak over the internet about 18 years ago. I had a lifelong abiding interest in mind/brain matters, and had started an online discussion group. First, Arnold Modell agreed and joined. He recommended Walter Freeman, who in turn recommended Jaak, John Searle, and Andy Clarke. Jaak recommended Morty Ostow. Others were recommended along the way as well. At some point along the way, Jaak was to “check me out” in person for Morty, who ran a monthly discussion group in New York City. At the time, he lived in Bowling Green, Ohio, and I am in Cleve land, a three hour drive away. I remember first meeting him and us spending an afternoon together and I felt it went well. I was then invited to the group and continued until it stopped after Morty's passing.
While Jaak's experimental accomplishments, his writing, and his providing a bridge for mind/brain matters are familiar to us all, my relationship with Jaak was primarily personal. I think that all of us had some kind of a very personal connection with him; that's just who he was.
I do not know exactly how it happened, but we became good friends. We would share a room in NYC, or wherever we were, even though we had full financial support for getting our own hotel rooms. We talked a great deal about our personal lives and how they led us to our interests. Our families visited.
I came to understand how Jaak's early life traumas had led to the determination which characterized his entire intellectual life. I think that some of that determination led to the emotional quality of his quarrels with researchers who rejected the subcortical anchors for affect, or who said that emotion can't be measured in non-human animals. I never thought that the emotional quality of those disagreements served him well, and I tried many times to think about changing his tone. But Jaak's same determination did not lead to much budging on the matter.
Jaak twisted my arm into doing some research, even though I said “no” many times. He convinced me to collaborate with him and Ziad Nahas in South Carolina on functional imaging effects with oxytocin. Fortunately, Ziad knows how to do research and we published. At the MindBrain Consortium in Ohio we did three studies. One on LDN, another oxytocin study, and a third using suboxone for depression. I got help with others doing the nitty gritty research aspects of things, and I stuck with the conceptual stuff. The suboxone study was very important, but I could not get the staff psychiatrists to comply with our protocols and eventually sent our grant money back. Jaak endlessly tried to get me to get the doctors under my thumb, but I said I could not take a stick to them.
I became ill and I could not finish writing up the other studies. I think that this was very frustrating to Jaak. But as a testimony to his gracefulness and caring, it did not affect our relationship very much. This is the man I knew and loved.
It was, and has been, terribly difficult to accept his passing. But as all others have said and know, he lives on as a beacon of light – for his accomplishments and who he was as a man.
Conclusion (Oliver Turnbull)
A few final words – including some things that, as I promised, have been mentioned by other speakers.
Firstly, the obvious: Jaak was a remarkable scientist. I have met many talented scientists across my career, but Jaak is the person who I think most deserved scientific recognition for ground-breaking work – understanding the biology that underpins something as elusive as emotion. And not just one emotion – which is the way that many impressive scientists spend their career – but all the basic emotions. And for realizing that these phenomena also underpin addiction, and recreational drug use, and underpin organic psychiatry! He was well-placed, scientifically, to deserve a Nobel Prize. One might debate why that nomination never came?
But there was also a remarkably personal element to Jaak's science. He cared about emotion – proper emotion. Not about fear conditioning, or reinforcement learning. Instead, Jaak cared about the science of feelings. And yet, when he began in the 1960s, it was at a time when feelings were deeply unfashionable in his science. Perhaps that is why that nomination never came? Though one would have to be blind not to see that scientific recognition of feelings is now growing. And equally blind not to recognize Jaak's central role in that.
And finally, I remind us that the feelings that he cared about the most, were his famous SEEKING and PLAY systems. He started out calling one of them a “curiosity-interest-expectancy” system. But Jaak was always looking for words that captured more than the abstract and technical. So, I think he phrased it best when he described that feeling as “enthusiasm”. In life, Jaak himself was a fierce enthusiast: an enthusiast for science, for consciousness and the self, and for animals and their feelings.
For these reasons, Jaak was an optimist. He was also a great supporter of young scientists, which is why we will be fortunate enough to award the Poster Prize after this session. But I would like to end with a moment that captures the positive side of Jaak's life, and let us remember that Jaak was most famous in popular science for his work on rat laughter. Not for rat sadness, or fear, or anger, but for feelings of optimism, and enthusiasm, and play. I think he would like to be best remembered for a positive emotion.
So could I ask us all to stand, and have a few moments of silence to remember Jaak. And while we have these moments of reflection, please can you find thoughts and remembrances that bring joy, and that raise a smile. Because it is those positive thoughts that best encapsulate Jaak's remarkable life.
(A minute of silence.)
I finish with a thought from Jaak's Affective Neuroscience (1998). Towards the end of the Preface (p. xi), he discusses a (later published) conversation he had with his daughter Tiina, aged 6, where he asks her, “How many different ways can we feel?” As Ken Davis reminded us, Tiina died tragically in a terrible car accident, and Jaak was heart-broken for several years. Yet, in the Preface, Jaak seeks a positive perspective on this moment with his daughter, saying, “Thanks, Tiina, wherever your spirit may be.” With that in mind, and for those of us from all religions, and of none, I’d like to end by saying that: “We love you, Jaak, wherever you are.”
Days of Wine and Roses
Notes
1 The names of the emotional systems are intentionally capitalized, as Jaak always did, to remind us that these are neural systems with accompanying autonomic, behavioral, and subjective aspects that are integral to the system.
2 Editor's note: These clips were taken from an extended interview that can be viewed in a curriculum to be launched in late 2017. For more details, visit www.npsa-association.org.