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As analysts we are closely attuned to our patient's feelings. We work to resolve emotional conflicts arising from the past to help our patients lead more fulfilling lives. Yet up until now, there has been limited understanding of how emotions arise and what functions they serve. The experimental work of Joseph LeDoux has opened up a whole new dimension that offers us knowledge about conscious and unconscious emotions. Drawing on fifteen years of laboratory research, LeDoux (1996) has provided psychoanalysts and psychiatrists with a comprehensive understanding of how the mind and brain function together to deal with emotions. With his work on the limbic system, LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University, has fulfilled Freud's hope to link anxiety to its biological foundations in the brain (Freud, 1920; Kris, 1975).
His experiments involved subjecting rats to fear-conditioning. He then demonstrated how the amygdala receives sensory input of threatening stimuli from the thalamus, and then signals the hypothalamus to produce the classical freezing, fight, or flight reactions. These reactions appear to be the same processes that underpin anxiety, phobias, posttraumatic stress, and panic disorders in humans (Armony and LeDoux, 1997; Bondi, 1992; LeDoux, 1994, 1995a, 1995b, 1996).
This article examines the nine basic properties that the amygdala imposes upon the above four major anxiety disorders and discusses seven techniques for treating them. Five case histories are presented demonstrating the application of LeDoux's concepts to psychotherapy. The future direction of collaboration between neuroscientists and psychiatrists that could enhance treatment of anxiety disorders is discussed.
The amygdalas are almond-shaped nuclear complexes, one each located in the right and left temporal lobe's anterior pole where they form