LAUSR

It is a real pleasure to comment on such an intelligent target article (Fotopoulou & Tsakiris, 2017) under the banner of Neuropsychoanalysis. I will restrict my commentary to a perceived disagreement between myself and the authors of this article. However, I do not disagree with their fundamental theoretical claim. In my view, all drives and instincts (what Panksepp calls “homeostatic affects” and “emotional affects” respectively) are inherently object-related. More pertinently, one of the things that distinguishes drives from instincts is that the objects of the latter are mainly social. (The objects of homeostatic drives – such as air, food and water – are less obviously social, at least until they coalesce in the SEEKING instinct.) The pivotal example of a social instinct is “attachment” – what Panksepp (1998) calls PANIC/GRIEF. How can you experience panic or grief without the loss of an ontogenetically encoded object of social attachment? The same applies to FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE and PLAY; all of these instincts necessarily entail particular types of social relation. After a long quote of my views concerning the id (Solms, 2013), the authors state their central claim: